Trent Mosley had played zero college football games in his life heading into Saturday. By the fourth quarter, USC was up 32 points and Mosley had turned into the best story of opening weekend: seven catches, 118 yards, a touchdown, and a 41-yard punt return on his very first career touch in the return game. He’s the first USC true freshman receiver to crack 100 yards in a debut since JuJu Smith-Schuster in 2014, and the first Power Four freshman anywhere to hit 7 catches, 100 yards, and a touchdown in a debut since Rondale Moore did it at Purdue in 2018. Lincoln Riley’s reaction afterward was almost bored about it. “I don’t think anybody here is very surprised,” he said. “That’s kind of what it looks like most days there.”

That’s the thing about Week 0. It’s supposed to be an appetizer, four or five games scattered around the calendar while everybody else is still finishing training camp, and it somehow always produces the moment that ends up defining somebody’s whole season. Mosley wasn’t even supposed to be the lead option in that USC receiving room. Presumptive starters Tanook Hines and NC State transfer Terrell Anderson were both unavailable, which is how a true freshman with four-star pedigree but no signature moment yet ended up as the headline instead of a footnote.

Mosley wasn’t the only Week 0 story out of Los Angeles, either. USC’s 42-26 win over San Jose State came with the Trojans up by as many as 32 points before coasting home, which is the kind of comfortable margin that lets a coaching staff feel good about the offense and worried about everything else at the same time. Riley brought in former TCU head coach Gary Patterson specifically to fix a defense that’s kept USC out of the College Football Playoff picture, and whether that hire pays off is a bigger question for this season than anything one freshman receiver did in Week 0. Elsewhere, Memphis knocked off UNLV in a genuine surprise, and both North Dakota State and Sacramento State made their FBS debuts, which is its own small piece of history buried under everything else that happened that Saturday.

The other Week 0 story deserves equal billing, and it’s a lot less fun for at least one fan base. Virginia beat NC State 34-8 in Charlottesville, and the final score somehow understates it. NC State had won eight straight season openers and had beaten Virginia four years running. Both streaks ended the same afternoon. Dave Doeren’s Wolfpack came in with real expectations of finally breaking through to a 10-win season, and instead turned in the most alarming performance of the young year, while Virginia, which was down several players of its own, walked away as the trendiest sleeper pick to actually challenge Miami in the ACC. One week doesn’t make a season, but it’s the kind of result that reframes how people talk about both programs for the next month, fair or not.

All of which sets up a Week 1 slate that doesn’t need Week 0’s help to matter. The sport’s biggest showcase weekend arrives Saturday and Sunday, and for once “biggest” isn’t just marketing copy. Clemson visits LSU in Baton Rouge in Saturday primetime, the kind of game that either launches a Tigers playoff run or ends it before September’s even over. Boise State heads to Oregon, the No. 2 team in the country, in a game Oregon is favored in by 24 and a half points, which tells you everything about how differently the two programs are being talked about right now. Baylor and Auburn play what amounts to a neutral-site game in Atlanta. And Notre Dame and Wisconsin are playing an actual regular-season game at Lambeau Field on Sunday, which is either a delightful bit of college football’s ongoing willingness to stage itself anywhere with a stadium, or proof that no venue is too sacred to rent out for a made-for-TV opener, depending on how sentimental you are about the frozen tundra hosting two programs that have no business playing a home game there.

Texas hosts Texas State as a No. 5 team trying to prove last year wasn’t the ceiling. Indiana, of all programs, opens as a top-six team against North Texas, still riding the credibility it built out of nowhere a year ago and daring anyone to call it a fluke. Alabama, Tennessee, and Penn State all get the kind of home openers that exist to be won comfortably and forgotten by October, right up until one of them isn’t.

Here’s the actual takeaway, buried under all the kickoff times: Week 0 already showed that surprises don’t wait for the “real” schedule to start, that a freshman with zero game experience can walk into the Coliseum and look like he’s done this for years, and that a four-year head-to-head advantage can evaporate in one Saturday afternoon. Week 1 doesn’t get to coast on being the bigger week just because more ranked teams are involved. It has to actually earn that billing. Given how last weekend went, there’s no real reason to expect it won’t.