Ever the marketing mavens, ESPN occasionally trots out a slogan for its television offerings. You know, “Feast Week,” or “Championship Week,” or “Separation Saturday.”
For those slow to get a start on their college-football seasons, I’d propose another marker: “Sobering Saturday.”

You know who you are. If you didn’t throw out a complete clunker in your opener last week, you lurched about so badly against Ipswich State, the coach’s call-in radio show required extra producers to have the seven-second delay at the ready.

I think it’s the great leveling effect of the off-season. The eight-month break from football tends to blur memories and smooth over frown wrinkles. Say you go 4-8 in 2024, but you have a history of winning seasons, at least sporadically. Your season ends and the in-and-out of the transfer portal happens, and your team undergoes something of what’s become kind of the inevitable makeover.

You go through off-season conditioning and then spring workouts, and the coach addresses daily developments with the media in spring practice.

A brush of optimism tends to take hold, often emanating from that coach, because the marketing people don’t like it if he says, “To tell you the truth, I think we’re gonna be awful.”

At conference media day, at least one player will say, “We’re a lot closer than we were last year,” and the coach will say, “We came back in the best shape since I’ve been here.”

August practices get shut down to outsiders, because, of course, the identity of the backup gunner needs to be a state secret. And nobody really knows what’s going on inside, and it could be something good, right?

Everybody is 0-0 in Week One -- Texas-San Antonio and Georgia, Bowling Green and Ohio State. Nobody’s better than anybody else, and hope springs eternal. Then the season starts – for some, with a slap in the face.

Out our way, the remaining Pac-12 members sustained a chilling dose of . . . well, they hope it isn’t reality.

Washington State schlepped to a 13-10 victory over Idaho in Jimmy Rogers’ first game as WSU coach. Even though they feature 70 new players, so much about the Cougars was surprising. The guy everybody assumed was the starting quarterback, Zevi Eckhaus, wasn’t one of the two who took snaps for WSU. The Cougars, rarely a formidable on the ground, took it to extremes, rushing 22 times for three yards. The lead back, Angel Johnson, carried 10 times – for negative yardage.

If it’s possible, down the road Oregon State might have looked even more grim against Cal. The Beavers have generally played pretty salty defense in this era, and in the off-season they landed Duke transfer quarterback Maalik Murphy at a reported $1.5 million, which would cover a good many pints at Clodfelter’s on Monroe in Corvallis. In a game whose line hovered around a tossup, the Beavers went out and got scalded, 34-15. Murphy was 21 of 33 but didn’t throw a touchdown pass, and was spotted on the sideline losing his cool – as columnist John Canzano put it – with offensive assistant Danny Langsdorf.

For perspective, Murphy’s opening-night quarterback rating was 119.7, putting him at 80th nationally.

Imagine how the faithful around UCLA feel (although assuming UCLA has faithful is a bit of a leap). One of the prominent stories of the off-season was quarterback Nico Iamaleava’s “holdout” at Tennessee, leading to his transfer to UCLA, where he is reported to have taken a pay cut to $1.2 million. (It’s probably safe to assume nobody gets a pay raise when they leave the SEC.)

Iamaleava’s welcome to Westwood was a disaster waiting to happen. All he and his teammates had to do was vanquish a Utah team bent on avenging a bad 2024 season, coached by one of the college game’s savants, Kyle Whittingham. The Utes blistered UCLA, 43-10, Iamaleava was a benign 11 of 22 for 136 yards, and before the final stats were tabulated, LA columnists were banging out pieces questioning whether DeShaun Foster, in his second season, could ever lead the Bruins to anything meaningful.

The deeper question around UCLA is why the Bruins have struggled so mightily to find anybody to approach the success of Terry Donahue, who hasn’t been there for 30 years. And whether this move to the Big Ten is a good fit for either side.

That’s a discussion for another day. For teams like WSU, OSU and UCLA, the off-season looks a long way off.