When you've listened to as many coaches as I have tell you how much respect they have for every opponent, you begin to distinguish the sincere from the phony.
And unlike the coach who sings the praises of a Dartmouth team, Villanova head coach Jay Wright was dead serious.
"They're good, man, I'm telling you," Wright said. "Mark my word. At the end of the year, they're going to be a really good team."
Wright may be a little overconfident.
If every Penn player could duplicate his effort from Saturday night, the Quakers would go 22-1 in their final 23 games. Seton Hall wouldn't be a problem, nor would Fordham, or any of the rest of the Big 5 teams.
No Ivy League team would play within 30 points of them.
The loss would be at North Carolina, a team which would threaten the 150-point mark.
But asking everybody to clone that effort would be unreasonable.
As we saw last year, even as the Quakers blew through the first half of the Ivy League schedule, it's hard to keep momentum going over the course of 14 games. Or in this case, 23.
Mark Zoller will come back to earth.
Stephen Danley will have more nights in foul trouble.
Ibrahim Jaaber will be slowed by an injury to that lanky frame from time to time.
Brian Grandieri will occasionally play like the Thursday-night intramural player he looks like.
And Tommy McMahon will have his cold shooting nights.
Maybe all of this will even happen on the same night.
A really good team is more than five really good players, which is all that Wright and anybody else has seen.
We saw last year what a lack of depth can do, as the Quakers stumbled into the Tournament and drew a nearly unwinnable matchup because they ran out of gas.
This year, we have no reason - yet - to expect anything different.
When Villanova's bench outscored Penn's, 28-3, it was nothing new. The Quakers have been on the short end of bench points in six of the seven games and tied in the other.
UTEP's bench had 15 in the opener to Penn's two; the Quakers' reserves put up a whopping zero while Drexel's scored 14.
With the rotation seeming to be whittled down to nine - the starters plus Brennan Votel, Mike Kach, Kevin Egee and Darren Smith - it's time for the bench to establish some consistency.
Just look at Saturday for an example of what that can do.
At times when very little was going right for Villanova, when Mike Nardi couldn't score and Curtis Sumpter was having trouble defensively, it was Shane Clark who came through. The sixth man got four enormous offensive rebounds and added 16 points.
Other than the Florida Gulf Coast game, when Smith was unconscious from beyond the arc, Penn hasn't had a performance like that.
And until somebody does, the starters are going to get awfully weary.
Near the end of his press conference, Wright made a statement usually reserved for Penn coaches talking about Villanova.
"It's going to be a great RPI game for us," Wright said.
That's going to depend on a lot of things - the bench being among the foremost.
Zachary Levine is a senior mathematics major from Delmar, N.Y., and is former Sports Editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian. His e-mail address is zlevine@sas.upenn.edu.
