Week 3: The early season-turning point for the college football world

Discourse around polling and general early-season rankings is often far too scrutinized and overly discussed.

[Sign up for Inside Texas TODAY for $1 and get the BEST Longhorns coverage!]

Everyone who’s been jonesing for football all offseason has been looking for SOMETHING to discuss in between the weekend slate of games. That’s what leads to an AP Poll voter having to private their Twitter account before conference play has even started.

While it is unacceptable to say your vote “doesn’t really matter” and to rank a team ahead of the one that beat them over the weekend, we are too early in the process to have any sort of definitive opinions on rankings. There does have to be some preseason bias involved in your rankings. You do need to give teams ranked in the top 10 the benefit of the doubt at times.

The nice thing about Week 3, though, is we will be able to almost entirely turn the leaf from offseason-weighted rankings.

While analytics nerds claim that you usually have a strong sample size of a team’s strength by their fifth game, we can at least take some sort of sample from every single important team in this year’s national title race.

Let’s check in on the top 10 teams in the nation entering the year and see what their most important matchup has been to this point.

No. 1 Texas vs. No. 3 Ohio State
No. 4 Clemson vs. No. 9 LSU
No. 6 Notre Dame vs. No. 10 Miami

All happened in the first week. We can all make takeaways from these teams just from the first game of the year. Additionally, we got an important nugget of information when then-No. 8 Alabama lost by 14 at Florida State to begin the year. That game has actually aged OK for Alabama, who beat up on ULM while FSU continues to look like an actual top-15 team.

You can even go a bit further in the original and current AP polls to find teams who have a data point that matters for their future CFP conversations. No. 10 FSU has that win, No. 9 Illinois destroyed Duke in NC, Oklahoma got a big win over Michigan, and former top-16 teams Florida and SMU have already lost to previously unranked units.

But there are still quite a few teams who have yet to play any type of notable football. Five of the top-16 teams in the nation faced only bottom-half of the FBS-level opponents in Weeks 1 and 2. Teams like Oregon and Tennessee at least faced P4 competition, but Oklahoma State and Syracuse shouldn’t give any top-16 teams trouble.

The three other teams feature two important names for Texas, Georgia and Texas A&M (alongside Penn State). We haven’t gotten a chance to assess either of these teams because their biggest tests have been Marshall and UTSA, respectively.

A lot of that changes this weekend, though. Tennessee and Georgia face off at the same time as Texas and UTEP on Saturday. You can bet a good portion of our press box is following along on the side. The result of that game will be the first real football Georgia has played and the first test for Tennessee.

Then, Texas A&M has to head to South Bend to face Notre Dame, which now faces its second top-20 opponent in three weeks. With a win, Notre Dame is firmly back in the national title contenders conversation. If A&M wins, they catapult into the top 10, and the discourse begins to change about that Thanksgiving week matchup.

In fact, only five current or former ranked teams will be without some sort of signature matchup up until this point. Penn State gets another week of nothingness and a bye before hosting Oregon on the 27th. The Ducks play at Northwestern, another P4 team they will trounce, ahead of that game. And while Texas Tech, Utah, and Indiana can be argued to have waltzed their way into a ranking they don’t deserve quite yet, those will all be tested on the 20th as well. The Utes will host the Red Raiders, and Indiana will host Illinois.

By Week 5, every team in the nation will have played enough games to truly understand their ability without any preseason bias, but for the teams we know can compete for the CFP title, this week is the beginning of tests for almost every major program.

Remember, the more weeks that pass and the more teams that fall, the better Texas’ seven-point road loss to the No. 1 team in the nation looks. By the time Texas rolls into Gainesville, AT LEAST nine of the top-25 teams will have added a loss on their resume. One of the top five will lose, and two of the top 16 will as well. Georgia has Tennessee and Alabama coming up. The polls we see today will look a lot different in three weeks time.

Hopefully, the voters take this into account and let the résumé completely speak for these teams heading into the Week 4 polls. Something tells me that won’t happen, though.

So while the Longhorns likely beat up on a Conference USA opponent, take the time to watch some other teams this week. See how well Gunner Stockton and Marcel Reed play for Texas’ future opponents. Understand who the actual title contenders are, as there are at least three games with serious playoff implications happening this weekend. Forget about preseason biases, trust what you see, and take notes on how these teams look going forward.