A word college football is using
“delusional”
The charge that a fan base's expectations have come loose from its team's actual quality.
Ordinary English, intensified by the internet diminutive 'delulu'.
How often it gets said
Daily mentions across the whole conversation corpus, smoothed over 7 days. A break in the line is a stretch where the word fell below the reporting floor — not a stretch where nobody said it.
Measured on 64 of the window’s 84 days.
- 1Sun Sep 20 · 28 mentions · Auburn lost 39-44 to Florida
- 2Sun Sep 6 · 24 mentions
- 3Sun Sep 13 · 22 mentions
A day is attributed to a program only when that program held at least 1.75× the next program’s mentions, from 5+ separate posts. The game shown is that program’s result within a day of the peak. A day with no program named was a day nobody owned.
Who’s saying it
Share of the posts, articles and transcripts in the window that used the word, by kind of source. Counted per document, not per mention, so one long transcript that says it twenty times is one voice, not twenty.
Most of the posts, articles and transcripts using “delusional” come from Reddit (70%), then YouTube (20%).
- Reddit 70%
- YouTube 20%
- message boards 4%
- podcasts and radio 3%
- beat writers and press 3%
What it sounds like
Real posts from the corpus, quoted verbatim. The community is shown; the username never is.
“You are delusional. And part of the problem of giving piss-poor excuses every couple of weeks throughout this entire failed coaching regime.”
“I've watched every Saturday for 39 years. Arkansas fans, as a whole, are delusional.”
“And these same internet tough guys who yell at us for not kissing the ass of overpaid losers, were the ones complaining when we had a 7-6 season, that “Arkansas has so much going for it.”
Who it gets said about
2026 season, FBS programs. These are mentions that name a program — from rival fans and national media as readily as from their own people — so this is what the sport says about a program, not what that program’s fans say.
| # | Program | Vs. the average program | Mentions | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Michigan | 1.6× | 47 | |
| 2 | Florida State | 1.5× | 35 | |
| 3 | Auburn | 1.5× | 35 | |
| 4 | Oregon | 1.3× | 38 | |
| 5 | Clemson | 1.1× | 28 | |
| 6 | LSU | 1.1× | 35 | |
| 7 | Florida | 1.1× | 33 | |
| 8 | Alabama | 1.1× | 41 | |
| 9 | Oklahoma | 1.1× | 28 | |
| 10 | Ohio State | 1.0× | 33 | |
| 11 | Georgia | 1.0× | 32 | |
| 12 | Texas | 0.9× | 35 | |
12 FBS programs cleared the 25-mention floor for this word. Ranked by over-index, not raw volume — raw volume just ranks how much a program gets talked about.