Something to keep in mind

This weekend's games, and even next weekend's, aren't perfectly indicative of where a team is at or is going to be.  I know watching Oregon's game last night, they'll go back and look at that after the season is done and think to themselves, "that looks nothing like how we really played during the season".  The same holds for everyone else.

There's so much feeling-out going on early in the season, and its coupled with unfamiliar opponents often in unfamiliar settings.  The demands on a coach at this point are pretty stressful, because a coach wants to win a game and stay in a position to content for league or national crowns, but the coach also wants to stick with the vision he's set out for his team, which may not always win an early game because his team isn't quite up to snuff or the opponent is stopping you.  So a coach often has to consider choosing between sacrificing the team's development and level of skill at the end of the season (where a team in theory is at its best) for an early win, or with doggedly implementing a scheme and mindset that may pay huge dividends down the road.

We'll see some odd upsets this weekend and the next, but try not to translate that to simply mean a team is overrated.  We are not always witnessing the behind-the-scenes decisionmaking, and quite often a team that has lost early goes on to do great things, and people dog it for some early loss that happened because it wasn't up to speed on its own system yet or its coach held back or what have you.