During the long, dark months between the end of one season and the beginning of another, we tell each other stories, because we need something to fill the void. We dress those stories up, calling them things like "way too early" rankings, preseason predictions or scalding hot takes, and we sustain them with statistics, data and historical perspective. But ultimately, they are at best educated guesses and, at worst, outright lies.

Then Week 1 comes along and college football delivers us a heaping dose of the truth, exposing our deceptions to the world like the kiss cam at a Coldplay concert.

On Saturday, college football's truth still seemed hard to believe.

We've spent months burnishing the image of our next Heisman Trophy winner, Arch Manning . Only, in Week 1, Manning's offense was

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