“hot seat”
Where a coach sits when the job is believed to be at risk.
Old sports-media vocabulary that fans adopted and never gave back.
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.
- 1Sun Nov 1
- 2Wed Oct 28
- 3Sun Oct 4
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.
“hot seat” is spread across sources: Reddit (43%), beat writers and press (31%) and podcasts and radio (15%).
- Reddit 43%
- beat writers and press 31%
- podcasts and radio 15%
- YouTube 7%
- message boards 2%
- Bluesky 1%
- campus papers 1%
What it sounds like
Real posts from the corpus, quoted verbatim. The community is shown; the username never is.
“Helmet logo is a slight upgrade, actual team? They need to pull an upset in their final 4 games to be bowl eligible. Bielema could be on hot seat next year.”
“8-1 having beaten OSU, I'll take. 7-2 beating OSU means losing to someone you should never lose to. This is why Riley is on the hot seat. He gets what he deserves.”
“We don’t have to reinvent the wheel to fix the disaster that happened at USC. I also like that Fahey wasn’t terrible either. I just don’t think the team came ready to play and thought USC would let us win.”
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 | Rutgers | 2.4× | |
| 2 | Boston College | 2.2× | |
| 3 | Baylor | 1.7× | |
| 4 | Northwestern | 1.7× | |
| 5 | Maryland | 1.7× | |
| 6 | Wisconsin | 1.6× | |
| 7 | Cincinnati | 1.5× | |
| 8 | New Mexico | 1.5× | |
| 9 | USC | 1.4× | |
| 10 | South Carolina | 1.4× | |
| 11 | North Carolina | 1.4× | |
| 12 | Oklahoma State | 1.3× | |
| 13 | NC State | 1.3× | |
| 14 | TCU | 1.3× | |
| 15 | Syracuse | 1.3× | |
75 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.