Words

This page has two halves, measured two different ways against the same corpus — Reddit, podcasts, newsletters, video and curated social.

What’s blowing up is open vocabulary: every word and phrase in the corpus is counted, and anything running far above its own recent normal surfaces here. The multiple compares the last 7 days against the previous 28, as a rate per thousand documents rather than a raw count, so a busy news week doesn’t promote everything at once. It is also checked against the same week LAST year, so the page rediscovers new language rather than rediscovering the football calendar — “rivalry week” spikes every November and is not news. Names of people, teams and places are excluded by design, as is sponsor-read and ad copy. Nothing here is reviewed by a person before it publishes; a small-model classifier and an automatic screen for the most serious content classes (violence, criminal charges, slurs) are the only filters between the count and the page.

The watchlist is the opposite: a closed, hand-curated list of fan slang, counted the same way every day. Terms are added deliberately and never auto-discovered, which is what makes a word’s history comparable across seasons — the thing a same-day trending word cannot offer.

Only football conversation is counted. Several of these sources carry material that has nothing to do with the sport — a campus paper runs the whole paper, a campus subreddit runs housing and parking — and a word like “fraud” or “cooked” means something else entirely there. Documents below the site’s football-relevance threshold are excluded before anything is counted.

A word only appears on this page if it cleared the reporting floor on a real share of the window’s days and carried real volume. Today is excluded from every window, because today’s count is still being collected and would render as a false collapse.

Every comparison on this page — a word’s trend arrow, a program’s heat check, what counts as trending at all — runs on a 7-day window, on purpose: college football’s conversation moves in whole weeks, not days, because the games that drive it are played almost entirely on Saturday. A 7-day calendar span always covers one Saturday no matter which day this page loads, so what moves here is meant to read as a real week-over-week shift, not an artifact of which day of the week you happened to check — though a word counted on too few of those days to clear the reporting floor can still average out a quiet Saturday along with the rest. Most real jumps land right after Saturday — that is the pattern working as intended, not noise.

Program boards cover the 2026 season and FBS programs only. A program needs 25+ mentions of a word to be ranked, and the over-index figure is pulled toward average in proportion to how thin the sample is, so a team scraping the floor can’t post a runaway number.

A mention is attributed to a program when the conversation names it — so these are counts of what college football says about a program, which is not the same thing as what that program’s own fans say. Rival fans, national media and podcasts are all in the count. A conversation naming several programs counts for each of them, so per-program counts are not a partition of the national count and must never be summed into one.

Player boards are stricter. A mention counts for a player only when the word falls within a few words of that player’s name in the text, so a post about a “washed” offense that names the quarterback elsewhere does not count against him. A player needs 8+ such mentions from 5+ separate posts to be ranked, and the same pull toward average applies.

The scorecard writes a call down the night a program tops a testable word’s board and judges it on a date fixed at the time of the call: “fraud” and “elite” against the closing line over the following four weeks, “cooked” against the next game, “hot seat” against who the head coach is in December. Straight-up record is shown beside the spread record but is never the judge. Nothing is settled early, and a call the facts don’t settle stays unsettled.