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The main point of it is that what we learn about our teams' early performance in their expanded box scores, to date, is more informative after 8 games than we may imagine, and give us a better idea about the team's prospects than the various rankings do after only 8 games.

--Also more informative than the rankings at this point are the W-L records, scoring margins, and indicators of the SOS of our team's upcoming opponents.

8 games is a small sample, and everything can change in conference play, but the data we have at this point tells us a lot more than we may realize, for anyone who is able to review pages like this one in enough detail:

https://www.sports-reference.com/cbb/sch.../2020.html

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The other main point is that, in almost every aspect of life, early data are often more representative than many of us realize.

That's why first impressions are often correct.