“fraud”
A team or player whose record or ranking is judged to overstate how good they actually are.
A staple of rivalry and poll arguments; spikes hardest the week a ranked team loses.
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 75 of the window’s 84 days.
- 1Sun Oct 18
- 2Sat Oct 10
- 3Sun Nov 1
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 “fraud” come from Reddit (67%), then YouTube (19%). Within this window, YouTube first cleared the reporting floor 2 weeks after Reddit did.
- Reddit 67%
- YouTube 19%
- beat writers and press 7%
- podcasts and radio 5%
- message boards 1%
- campus papers 1%
What it sounds like
Real posts from the corpus, quoted verbatim. The community is shown; the username never is.
“That would be even worse than Jimbo. Kelly is a complete fraud”
“Eddie George is a fraud. They hired a social media influencer and mascot, not a football coach.”
“As long as both teams show up and just play to their capacity this is a win win regardless the outcome. Many of the national talking heads are convinced that one or both teams are frauds.”
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 | USC | 1.8× | |
| 2 | BYU | 1.6× | |
| 3 | Utah | 1.5× | |
| 4 | SMU | 1.3× | |
| 5 | Florida State | 1.3× | |
| 6 | Notre Dame | 1.2× | |
| 7 | Indiana | 1.2× | |
| 8 | UCLA | 1.2× | |
| 9 | Florida | 1.2× | |
| 10 | Michigan | 1.1× | |
| 11 | Missouri | 1.1× | |
| 12 | Iowa | 1.1× | |
| 13 | Oregon | 1.1× | |
| 14 | Miami | 1.1× | |
| 15 | Nebraska | 1.1× | |
34 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.