A striker scores four in three games and is declared unplayable. He then goes six without and is declared finished. Both verdicts are drawn from samples far too small to support them.
Goals are rare events, which makes them noisy
A forward might take three or four attempts in a match. Across five matches that is perhaps eighteen chances, which is a very thin base for any conclusion.
Rare events cluster naturally. Flipping a coin twenty times produces streaks that look meaningful and are not, and shots behave the same way.
So a scoring run and a drought can both emerge from an unchanged player taking the same kinds of chances at the same underlying rate.
Chance quality moves before scoring does
What does change quickly is the quality of the opportunities a striker receives, and that depends on teammates, opponents and the way the team is set up.
A forward whose team has started creating cutbacks instead of hopeful crosses will score more without having improved as a finisher at all.
Reading the chances rather than the conversions separates the player's contribution from the team's, and it moves earlier than the goal column does.
Confidence is real but smaller than it is credited
Strikers do report feeling different during a run, and there is some evidence in behavior: shots taken earlier, from tighter angles, with less hesitation.
That shift changes shot selection more than it changes execution, and a striker taking harder chances can score at a lower rate while feeling excellent.
Which is why a hot streak sometimes ends with the forward playing well and the numbers cooling, a pattern that reads as a slump and is not one.
The American calendar amplifies the problem
College seasons are short, and a player's entire body of work in a year can be a few dozen matches split across competitions with different standards.
Scouts and selectors are then comparing samples that would be considered inadequate in any league that plays a longer schedule.
Decisions made on that basis are closer to coin flips than the certainty of the language around them suggests, which is worth remembering during recruitment season.
What a longer view actually shows
Over a full season the noise averages out and a striker's rate settles near a stable number, which is why season totals are the smallest useful unit.
Careers settle further still, and forwards who looked wildly inconsistent across months often turn out to have been remarkably steady across years.
The practical rule is simple: judge finishing over seasons, judge chance creation over months, and treat anything shorter as entertainment rather than evidence.