Florida Man by the numbers
The game runs on a library of real headlines and a growing pile of answers. Both are public - the library by topic, the answers in the archive - so here is what they look like in aggregate, as of September 2026. The counts change daily as the collector runs; the shape has been stable.
The library
- 368 real headlines approved for play, out of 685 collected. The other 317 were rejected - by the safety review (death, violence, sexual content, minors, hate, politics) or because they were articles about the meme rather than a story - a rejection rate of 46 %, which says something about the genre.
- 750+ fake headlines written and judged, roughly two per real one, so a real headline meets a different fake each time it comes back.
- Average length: 12 words for a real headline, about 13.6 for a fake. The model consistently adds one extra detail. Our spotting guide explains why that matters.
- 64 % of real headlines start with the words "Florida man". The rest lead with the city, the object or the verb.
Topics
Each headline gets one or more topics. Police encounters dominate, which is exactly what you would expect from a genre that is built on public arrest reports:
- Police encounters - 196 headlines (53 %)
- Driving - 67
- Food - 65
- Theft - 46
- Animals - 44 (plus 17 that are specifically alligators)
- Drugs - 40, alcohol - 34
- Money - 32, naked - 31, court - 28
The famous ingredients are rarer than the meme suggests. Only 17 of 368 headlines involve an alligator, 3 involve Walmart, 5 a boat and 2 a hurricane. If you feel a headline is trying too hard to be Florida, it may be a fake.
Years
Almost 85 % of the library is from 2018 and 2019 (174 and 154 headlines). That is not because Florida was stranger then; it is the trace of the March 2019 "Florida Man Challenge", when the internet went through the archives and surfaced every headline it could find - and of r/FloridaMan, whose most-upvoted posts are from the same period. The collector adds current stories every night (39 from 2026 so far), so the balance shifts slowly towards the present.
Sources
Every real headline links to the outlet that published it. The most frequent are Florida's own newsrooms - the Tampa Bay Times, the South Florida Sun Sentinel, WFTV, WPTV, First Coast News, NBC Miami, Fox 35 Orlando, ClickOrlando - followed by national outlets that pick the stories up (Newsweek, the New York Daily News, the Washington Post). When a link dies we swap it for an Internet Archive copy rather than drop the headline.
How people guess
This is the part we find most interesting. Across the first 222 answers recorded in the daily challenge, players picked the real headline 44 % of the time. That is below a coin flip. It is not noise: the pairs that fooled the most people are the ones where the fake is funnier than the truth.
- Florida Man arrested for attempted overthrow of Venezuelan government (real, 20 % picked it) lost to a fake about a 911 call over a lost flip-flop.
- Florida man caught driving from sunroof tells police he'd prefer jail (real, 21 %) lost to a fake about stealing an ambulance to drive to hospital.
- Deputies remove Florida man from stolen vehicle with a monkey clinging to him (real, 29 %) lost to a fake about a python in a mailbox.
The pattern is consistent with the guide: people expect Florida Man to be a joke, so they choose the headline with the better punchline. Reality is stranger and less tidy. We will update these numbers as the answer count grows; the day-by-day figures are in the archive.