A good coaching staff engages in a high level of self-scout. What are your own tendencies? Where are your blind spots? The best teams tend to be pretty good at spotting those things at the same speed that their opponents do.
A particularly high amount of self-scout happens during bye weeks. Considering Week 11 of the college football season was mostly a bye week of sorts for the national title race -- only two of the AP's top six teams played (Notre Dame and Florida), and they won by a combined 42 points -- I figured I would take a page out of the coaching handbook and look inward.
While each season features its share of out-of-nowhere stories that virtually no one saw coming -- in 2020, that would include the unprecedented dominance of Cincinnati and BYU, an 0-4 start for Penn State, etc. -- I wanted to look at a few items I was personally wrong about in the preseason, for both learning and mea culpa reasons.
I wasn't sure Florida QB Kyle Trask could lead an elite offense
I was pretty sure that while the Gators wouldn't have a Georgia-level defense, it would be worthy of a top-five or top-10 rating. I was struggling, however, to figure out if Trask was capable of the type of breakthrough required for Florida to make a big run. From my SEC East preview: