If you cover college football for any amount of time, you have to further and further refine your definition of trust in the sport. During the preseason, this is essential. We don’t know about these teams from week to week, much less year to year when player movement is constant and NIL has introduced a host of new factors to consider.
So we often lean on things that look like we can trust them. A veteran quarterback coming back is one example, a good play-calling head coach is another and the biggest of all is when dozens of returning starters try to run it all back in pursuit of a historic year.
