“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 80 of the window’s 84 days.
- 1Sun Oct 18
- 2Sun Sep 27
- 3Sat Oct 3 · Penn State lost 13-34 to Northwestern
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 (77%), then YouTube (19%).
- Reddit 77%
- YouTube 19%
- beat writers and press 1%
- message boards 1%
- podcasts and radio 1%
What it sounds like
Real posts from the corpus, quoted verbatim. The community is shown; the username never is.
“Stadium renovations ≠ facilities chief LARP, and it’s not just because of semantics, one is revenue generating and the other isn’t, that’s a huge deal.”
“I said they spent $450m on facilities and then you tried to claim that wasn't true. Newsflash: it is.”
“Was Doak not $300m? You do the math. >Many said FSU was “too broke” to fire Norvell, then they did. This is rich. FSU fans were wailing for over a year now for him to be fired and he wasn't.”
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 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Michigan | 1.8× | |
| 2 | Florida State | 1.7× | |
| 3 | Oregon | 1.6× | |
| 4 | Auburn | 1.4× | |
| 5 | Wisconsin | 1.3× | |
| 6 | South Carolina | 1.3× | |
| 7 | Oklahoma | 1.2× | |
| 8 | Alabama | 1.2× | |
| 9 | Ohio State | 1.2× | |
| 10 | Notre Dame | 1.1× | |
| 11 | LSU | 1.1× | |
| 12 | Texas | 1.1× | |
| 13 | Florida | 1.1× | |
| 14 | Kentucky | 1.1× | |
| 15 | Clemson | 1.0× | |
17 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.