From FSU to Dan Mullen, here are three 'overreactions' from week zero of the college football season

Week zero of college football and everybody's already lighting their hair on fire. Florida State scrapes by New Mexico State and suddenly the message boards want the whole coaching staff gone. UNLV drops one to Memphis and it's treated like a program-wide crisis. This is the sport doing what it always does in August: teaching grown adults that one game means almost nothing, and watching them ignore the lesson anyway.

The USC empty-Coliseum story is the one actually worth chewing on, though, because it's not really about football. A half-full or empty stadium for a season opener says something about ticket pricing, about fan fatigue, about whether prestige programs can coast on name recognition forever. That's a real conversation. Whether Dan Mullen's team looked shaky for a quarter is not.

We'd just point out that this yearly ritual of mass overreaction is its own kind of tell. Fans and pundits alike have gotten so used to instant verdicts, on everything from politics to sports, that nobody wants to sit with uncertainty for even a week. Win ugly and you're a fraud. Lose to a supposed lesser team and your coach is on the hot seat by September. Somewhere in there the actual sport, the long grind of a season, gets lost.

None of this is a call for fans to care less. It's a call to remember that judgment earned over twelve games beats judgment rushed after one. That's true on the field, and it's not a bad rule for anything else either.