Week 4 Game Day Kickoff: Can Oregon turn a corner? Is USC for real? - ESPN

We are at a strange point in the college football season. On the one hand, we know next to nothing. Highly ranked teams such as Penn State, Indiana, USC and Georgia have yet to play a credible opponent, unless you consider Arkansas credible, which Kirby Smart certainly does not.

On the other hand, we're 25% of the way through the regular season for most schools, so certainly those first three games have to mean something, right?

Football's greatest strength and most frustrating deficit is its sheer scarcity of data points. We appreciate each game because there are so few to enjoy, and yet we debate the meaningfulness of each contest endlessly because that same scarcity affords so many possible interpretations of the results.

For example, is Oregon a team that we believed was a national championship contender to start the season? Or is it a team that looked comically inept against Oklahoma State and cycles through top receivers like Spinal Tap drummers?

Was Oklahoma's underwhelming 14-6 win over New Mexico last week a classic case of a letdown game after the loss to Michigan against a better-than-you-think Group of 6 school that viewed the game as its Super Bowl or a reminder that the Sooners' offense is less explosive than a can of Sprite someone dropped on the floor?

Or how about Texas A&M? What if last week's stunning loss to Kentucky actually says more about an up-and-coming Wildcats team under new head coach Will Stein — a team that gave Alabama all it could handle for a half a week earlier, mind you — than it does about the Aggies?

In the playoff era, knee-jerk reactions are the norm, and it would be easy enough to write off the Ducks, Sooners and Aggies as yet another round of preseason darlings that ended up