Previewing a given college football season is an exercise in separating things into known knowns and known unknowns. Based on who returns or how they've performed, we can say that Team A, Unit B and Player C are all going to be good this season. We also understand that we don't know nearly enough about New Starter D or New Receiving Corps E. We figure out what we know and whom we need to learn more about, and off we go.
Previewing the 2021 season required us to also acknowledge the existence of unknown knowns. We had the same list of good returning players and new starters, but there was also a giant cloud hovering about basically anything we wrote or discussed. Because of all the uniqueness that went into the 2020 season -- the sterile, often crowd-free environments, the constant rescheduling and cancellations, the fact that some teams barely played any games at all, the extra hits two-deeps took from positive COVID tests -- we didn't really know what pieces of information we could trust.
As we approach the November homestretch of the 2021 season, with a load of huge games on deck for Week 9, it's a good time to look back at some of the questions we were asking in the preseason. More specifically, it's time for some self-scouting -- while I got plenty right in the preseason, let's take a look at things I got particularly wrong.