Sagarin has UCLA at number 13.
Here's the schedule, and the rankings of teams played and yet to play.
@ SDSU 91
Rice 90
Oklahoma 37
Washington 93
California 16
@ Washington State 24
Oregon State 41
Stanford 87
@ Arizona 74
Arizona State 15
@ USC 1
As you can see, these ratings agree with the assessment that SDSU and Rice are terrible.
Stanford is clearly pretty bad too, and Arizona isn't good, based on these ratings. However, the rest of the games we will be playing teams ranked higher than Oklahoma's 37, with the exception of Oregon State, and 41 is close enough that you could argue that game is about as difficult as Oklahoma.
Of eight remaining games, three are against bad teams (Arizona, Stanford, UW). There is one more against a mediocre team (Oregon State).
And the other four are against decent teams (Cal, WSU, ASU, USC).
Those are the four games that will show how good this team is.
Based on these rankings, OU was only mediocre, and the other two games were against terrible teams.
Of course, only three weeks into the season, it's easy to say that these rankings may be incomplete, or that some of these teams may improve, and so on.
But this seems about right.
My earlier assessment, based on winning percentage, that this was the easiest "quarter" of the season, is clearly true.
I'm sure there are plenty of people who are going to accuse me of raining on their parade.
That's not the case. I'm ecstatic that we're 3-0. But we should be 3-0, and we haven't played a good team yet.
I won't disagree that the team has shown improvement and promising signs.
It's just too early to get excited.