A word college football is using
“transfer portal”
The transfer system, and by extension the act of leaving a program through it.
Literal — the NCAA Transfer Portal, which became a verb almost immediately.
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 84 of the window’s 84 days.
- 1Thu Aug 20 · 183 mentions · 49 of 183 mentions named Ole Miss
- 2Sun Sep 6 · 161 mentions
- 3Thu Aug 27 · 158 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.
“transfer portal” is spread across sources: beat writers and press (32%), Reddit (31%) and podcasts and radio (17%).
- beat writers and press 32%
- Reddit 31%
- podcasts and radio 17%
- YouTube 10%
- message boards 5%
- campus papers 4%
What it sounds like
Real posts from the corpus, quoted verbatim. The community is shown; the username never is.
“The team won 3 games last year, the guys portaled in are mostly for a peak next year which is when the schedule ramps up.”
“While less than a decade ago, that was honestly a different time.”
“Yeah and the 4 stars we did have didn't do anything here or after us either. Just complete whiffs in talent acquisition at the most important position on the field.”
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.
The sport says “transfer portal” about every program at about the same rate, so a ranking of it would just be a ranking of which programs get talked about most. That isn’t a finding, so this page doesn’t publish one.