1. Don't be fooled by the false harbingers of pre-season.

2. Don't fall for the Collingwood hype.

And then we break them. Every year.

And so here we are again after four rounds, feeling either hurt (if you're a Collingwood supporter) or smug and full of schadenfreude (if you're not).

And blaming the coach. It might be the coach; that will come out in the wash.

But first, a recap: In the past two years, Collingwood have finished 11th and 12th. Their record across those two seasons is not even break-even. Last season, the Magpies lost nine of their last 12 games.

They were unsettled seasons, with many comings and goings, but the bottom line was the bottom line. The stats show the Magpies were where they belonged. They were mid-table in most categories. In kicking efficiency and disposal efficiency, they were bottom four. Lots of stats are effects, but disposal efficiency is cause, unambiguously. The most efficient disposal team of the times hjas won the last three premierships.

For the Magpies, there would be no quick fix, only the delusion of one.

Between seasons they recruited aggressively, and on the face of it, well. They won pre-season games against Geelong, the Bulldogs and North Melbourne, all with high hopes themselves this season. They figured prominently in all the speculation about the final eight, even the final four. The club didn't discourage it; there would have been no point.

A month later, Collingwood are flat on their face.

Ruefully, we have been reminded that pre-season games disguise more than they reveal. We have also been reminded that an AFL team is a big beast, and takes more than one or two men to turn around, unless they are Lance Franklin, say, or Gary Ablett. For all the drama, the Collingwood team that lost to Melbourne on Saturday was only four players different from the team that lost to Essendon in round 23 last year.

Three are newcomers. Adam Treloar is living up to his billing, but James Aish and Jeremy Howe have made hesitant starts. It cannot have helped that the team around them is so out of form. Dane Swan and Marley Williams are out for an extended period. Travis Cloke, Jack Crisp and Tom Langdon are way out of touch. That is five of the top 10 in last year's best-and-fairest. Cloke has been sub-optimal for so long that he must be considered to be not just in a slump, but in decline. It happens sooner to big blokes in battering roles.

Matthew Scharenberg is out for the season and Nathan Freeman out of the club; there goes the cream of the 2013 draft. And Jordan de Goey, the 2014 pea and 2015 revelation, has started 2016 slowly.

The stats are again damning. The Magpies are 15th for kicking efficiency and last for disposal efficiency overall. Because of this they cannot keep the ball, and are last for uncontested possession. Because of that, they struggle to get the ball forward, and are bottom four for inside 50s. Because of that, they struggle to score. The bug has caught even Treloar, who is averaging 30-plus disposals a game, a career-high, but only half of them are reaching their targets, a career-low. And the trouble with Scott Pendlebury in his occasional deployment at half-back is that he doesn't have Scott Pendlebury farther down the ground to hit up.

And so the Magpies are 1-3, and lucky to be that. For now at least we can turn the microscope around, and remember the rules: the pre-season is not the season, and Collingwood is not the Messiah.