What we know through CFB's Week 4, plus Kamario Taylor's rise and Michigan's karma - ESPN

There is a temptation in college football to assign meaning to everything.

All year.

Transfers. Coaching changes. Recruiting classes. Spring games. Fall camp reports.

There are national preseason polls, conference preseason polls and preseason all-conference teams. We rank recruiting classes before the players arrive on campus and transfer classes before anyone knows how those players will fit together. For roughly eight months, the sport runs on speculation.

A complex explanation isn't needed for why all of this exists.

It's entertaining. It's fun. And most of the time, none of it really matters. Every year, we joke about how meaningless the preseason polls are. Coaches preach it, regardless of where their teams show up.

Usually, by the quarter pole of the season, those preseason predictions look foolish.

This year, that has kinda been the case. The top two teams in the preseason poll, Ohio State and Oregon, are not undefeated. Oklahoma, the preseason No. 10, will almost certainly not be ranked when the next poll is released, and the same goes for preseason No. 8 Texas A&M — both teams have two losses.

It's significant that 40% of the top 10 hasn't met expectations, but despite that, it doesn't feel like the sport has been thrown into anything approaching chaos. For some of the movement at the top, the preseason consensus has mostly held up.

Ten of the preseason Top 25 remain undefeated. Collectively, those 25 teams have won 82.2% of their games. The order has changed. But the broad group of teams we thought would shape the season largely still is.

Part of that is because the first few weeks didn't give us many chances to test our assumptions but on Saturday, that changed. There were six games between ranked teams,