This week's theme for our Upset Watch column is inconsistency. It's difficult to figure out how good teams are when they play completely differently every week. Are the Detroit Lions the team that got smashed by the Jets in Week 1, or the team that beat the Patriots and Packers later in the season? Is Miami the team that started 3-0, or the team that the Lions beat easily last week? How much do we learn from Seattle starting 0-2, or Houston starting 0-3, now that it's a month later?

The answer is that games in the past mean more than most fans think. Our minds tend to concentrate only on the last couple of weeks, but historically the most predictive stats have a bigger sample size. At Football Outsiders, even our rating that is weighted for more recent games still gives almost full strength to the last eight weeks of games. With the season less than eight weeks old, that means every game still matters and still teaches us about how good teams are. We can still learn from how badly the Lions played in their early losses, and we can still learn from how well the Miami offense played during that 3-0 start.

So what does that mean? The Lions may not be as good as you think, and Miami is probably better than you think.

Upset watch: Seattle Seahawks at Detroit Lions (-3)

Right now, the comparison of these two teams in Football Outsiders' DVOA ratings (explained here) is no contest. Seattle ranks 10th in the league, while Detroit is way down at No. 28. However, a big part of that gap is the Lions' Week 1 loss to the Jets, the worst single-game DVOA of any team this year. Take that game out, and the Lions' DVOA improves to roughly 14th. But that's still below the Seahawks.