It's pretty easy to get a lot of the big-ticket predictions right in college football. For the most part, this year's best teams will be last year's best teams. You can craft a semi-reliable Heisman favorites list by simply writing down the names of the quarterbacks from those top teams. Throw in the fact that my preseason SP+ projections give me a decent cheat sheet for whom to proclaim overrated or underrated, and I feel I get a decent amount of things right from year to year.
Getting stuff right, however, is boring. It's much more interesting to reflect on your swings and misses. So just as I did around this time last year, I've decided to do some self-scouting. For all the tens of thousands of preview words that I wrote in the offseason, what were some of my bigger whiffs? What was I most blind to, and what does it mean for the rest of 2022? Let's get critical!
I underestimated Bo Nix
I never saw what others proclaimed to see in Bo Nix. The former Auburn quarterback seemed to believe in his own scrambling abilities far too much with the Tigers, which resulted in a few moments of magic, a lot of ill-advised sacks and related disasters, an average Total QBR ranking of 40th and a mediocre 16-13 record over his last 29 games in an Auburn uniform.
The Auburn legacy elected to transfer for his fourth season, which made plenty of sense, but I wasn't sure he was the answer for an Oregon team in need of a bounce-back after 2021's late-season collapse. (After a 9-1 start, the Ducks lost three of their last four games by a combined 123-49.) I felt the best-case scenario in Eugene might be a youngster such as Ty Thompson, and Jay Butterfield winning the job over him.