5 Thoughts About PAC-12 Football After Week 3

1. The Everpresent Hype Machine: It's only week 3 and people are having a conniption on whether USC will make the playoffs after a poor showing against Texas. At the same time, everyone seems concerned that the previously anointed Top-NFL-Draft-Pick, Sam Darnold, is having trouble. These things happen to teams who play good teams. You don't learn a damned thing about teams playing crappy ones. For instance, in two weeks of playing crappy teams, Louisville's Lamar Jackson was being hyped as Lamar 5.0 or whatever. And then Clemson feasted on him. Don't believe the hype.
2. UCLA's Problem: They don't have much of a defense to speak of, and they haven't faced a team with a good defense. Up to now, their games have been high-scoring affairs. What happens when they meet a team with a decent defense? Going up next week against Stanford will tell us about how they perform against a good defense.
3. Stanford's Down Year?: I know SDSU is a fairly good MW team, but geez, losing to them? That's got to be the wake-up call for the offense, in particular. As suspected, that injury is mentally affecting Keller Chryst and Ryan Burns is just not going to cut it.  Bryce Love is as advertised, but he's still not a replacement for McCaffrey. Without a good offense, you saw how difficult it was for their defense to stay competitive.
4. Cal is Not Bad: Beating Ole Miss is not to be taken lightly. Sure, the Rebels are probably caught up in a lot of turmoil after Hugh Freeze quit in the middle of summer following the reporting of his using female escorts to recruit players, but still, they're a power-5 team that is probably somewhere between the middle and bottom tiers of power-5 teams. In other words, Cal is not bad. The Beavers are (super) bad, but not Cal. USC's still gonna open a can of whup ass in Berkeley, though, and I'm saying that because Justin Wilcox sucked badly as a DC at USC, then got a lot of pats on the back for his one year at Wisconsin taking over an existing powerhouse defense built by Dave Aranda (Wilcox's defense underperformed Aranda's).
5. Big Week: This week is going to be huge, as many games will help us understand how good (or bad) some teams are. Washington and Colorado finished at the top of their division last year so their matchup is going to be a great metric for both teams and the rest of the conference. The second-biggest game is UCLA vs Stanford, as this game will really tell us if Stanford's in a down year or not and whether UCLA's ready to take the next step while Josh Rosen's still at UCLA. The third-biggest game is Oregon at ASU, where we see how good that Oregon defense really is. These three games are all at night (7 / 7:30 pm), meaning: #pac12afterdark. Crazy things happen in PAC-12 games at night.