Hey everybody! I suppose I get bored easily, I don't know. Anyway, I tend, with some regularity, to embark on multipart rankings, historical retrospectives, etc. Of course, it's easier to get bored when your favorite team--in this case Wisconsin--is likely to be mediocre at best. So, yeah, I'm going to trying a weekly thing that will probably just assume it's own shape as the weeks progress.
We all want our team to be good. But they probably won't be. Or, even if they're pretty good, they'll still disappoint us in some profound way. What then? Well, cheer for a fun CFB season, generally. Your idea of fun might be seeing all of your hated teams lose. Or to have somebody come out of nowhere and be really good. Or just a lot of bonkers games to keep your attention away from your own mediocre team. I'm not saying there's one right answer. The purpose here each week will be to over-interpret the week that was and feed a chosen narrative by selectively drawing on the lessons of history.
This week's hypothesis: first impressions tend to be more predictive that you suspect.
Week 0 in Review
Eight games. Only three were competitive. It's easy to say "Well, it's the first game. Teams are rusty. You really don't want to draw any conclusions yet. There's a lot of season left. After all, look at FSU/Alabama last year."
Fair point. But what other example comes readily to mind that backs up the "'Gotta fire DeBoer, Pawl!" n or 1? I would say that FSU/Alabama is the outlier, and the norm is what you see (in Week 0) is what you get (for the rest of the season). An infographic during the UNC/TCU game noted the recent upsets in the Dublin game. And if you look at those teams' seasons as a whole, the Week 0 underperformance tended to be predictive:
2022: Northwestern 31, Nebraska 28 (yep, Nebraska went on to suck)
2024: Georgia Tech 24, #10 FSU 21 (FSU went 2-10)
2025: #24 Iowa State, #17 Kansas State 21 (KSU went a disappointing 6-6)
Because I'm a big dork, I went over B1G seasons in five year increments (including current B1G teams before they were members), and found a few other examples from Week 0:
1991: #7 Penn State 34, #8 Georgia Tech 22. The Yellowjackets brought a fair amount of talent back from the defending national champions (split title; GT won the coaches poll, Colorado the AP), but Penn State drilled GT, building a 34-3 lead before the Yellowjackets made it look respectable in garbage time. Guess what? Penn State went on to go 11-2 and finish #3. GT went a disappointing 8-5.
1996: #11 Penn State 24, #7 USC 7. Five years later, Penn State was at it again (Joe Paterno was exceptional with more than a week to prepare). Taking on the defending Rose Bowl champions, Penn State throttled the Trojans, using the Pigskin Classic as a springboard to another 11-2 season, finishing in the top 10 (and were a Tim Dwight punt return away from going 12-1). But USC, whose only points came in the last minute, wasn't necessarily in store for a disappointing season because they looked bad in Week 0, right? Wrong. The Trojans would go 6-6/3-5.
2021: Illinois 30, Nebraska 22. Just because Illinois pulled off the upset behind a new coach in a Week 0 game doesn't mean Nebraska actually sucks...right? Wrong. 3-9/1-8. To be fair, expectations for Nebraska were far from those of top 10 Georgia Tech and USC teams. That said, I think we can all agree that Nebraska fell woefully short of their own expectations and an uninspiring loss to a team that would go 5-7 was, indeed, a harbinger.
So, yeah, NC State probably sucks. TCU is probably not going to be a Big 12 dark horse. Hawaii is probably a spoiler, at best, in the MWC. One of these statements might be wrong, but I'll take first impressions in the aggregate. And given that most teams are starting their season this week, let's extend the comparison to Week 1 games (from years ending in 1 or 6):
2021: Montana 13, #20 Washington 7. Oof, that's not a good loss. Still the Huskies were picked second in the Pac 12 North. Don't overreact. Still plenty of time to right the ship, correct? Nope. 4-8/3-6.
2016: Wisconsin 16, #5 LSU 14: Sexy natty pick LSU starts the season off on the wrong foot. But they had an unsettled QB situation and the game was in Lambeau, so this was probably just a fluky thing, right? Okay, yes, LSU did go 8-4 and finish ranked. But the season was disappointing enough that Les Miles was fired midseason. And unranked Wisconsin, who no preview mag had winning the Big West, went on to an 11-3 season and top 10 finish, with all three losses coming to teams that finished in the top 10.
2011: Maryland 32, Miami 24: Expected to be Virginia Tech's chief competition in the ACC Coastal, the Hurricanes stubbed their toe in their opener, falling to the Terps in Randy Edsall's first game as HC. Surely, the Hurricanes can bounce back, right? No. 6-6/3-6. (Maryland would go 2-10. Ugh.)
I don't mean to suggest that first impressions only reveal teams that suck more than anticipated. Again, see '91 and '96 PSU, and '16 Wisconsin. But certainly it can be the case that an opening-game blowout only tells us something meaningful about one team. (Can we say both that Virginia is really good and NC State is really bad based on one game? Maybe, maybe not.)
Even harder is being confronted with a really close game and knowing what to conclude. Sometimes, and this is part of why I love college football so much, two teams who are supposed to be pretty good have to play each other in Week 1 and give us a classic because both teams ARE really good. Clemson/LSU seems like the only feasible chance of that happening this year, and I'm not buying it.
In B1G land in the 80s and 90s, this was often the Notre Dame/Michigan game. In '86 was heavily favored Michigan surviving a Notre Dame scare in Lou Holtz's first game with the Irish. And in '91, Desmond Howard's famous TD catch actually came in Michigan's second game of the year.
So, let's close out with one of my favorite examples of teams with high expectations meeting in Week 1, delivering a stone classic, and it really, really mattering. It's one of my favorites because expectations for both teams were high, but it wasn't a top 10 matchup, so it didn't get a lot of national play. But at the end of the year, we all looked back and said "Damn, that game really mattered. It was a classic. We just didn't fully know it at the time."
Turn your eyes westward and go back to the 1996. USC was the preseason Pac-10 favorite, and their loss to Penn State wasn't a conference game. But if you watched it and thought that the Trojans might be overrated, the teams that were second and third in the Pac-10 preseason predictions that year were Arizona State and Washington. And they met in Week 1 in Tempe. Both rosters were littered with future NFL players (Jake Plummer, Corey Dillon, about two dozen others) and the game was as good as you could hope to see. Washington stormed back from a 21 point 4th quarter deficit to tie things up, but then fell on a last second FG, losing 45-42. At the end of the season, Arizona State advanced to the Rose Bowl, winning the Pac 10 at 11-0/8-0. Washington was second, going 9-2/7-1.
So, sure, Weeks 0/1 aren't necessarily determinative. But they usually aren't contra-indicative either.
Have fun with Week 1. There's bound to be a couple of surprisingly close games. Right?
