What a season it’s been for the Oregon Ducks. The team went 12-0 through the regular season and then on Saturday night they secured the B1G Championship by defeating Penn State. The Ducks have done what few predicted in their first year; they have defeated all the B1G blue bloods on their way to going undefeated. Even Mr. FishDuck spent a moment sharing his thoughts with me about the game before going back to his online casino login for some more fun.
Though for Duck fans, we can be forgiven for freaking out at every step of the way. As fans, we have seen Our Beloved Ducks rise to the top of the college football world only to be knocked down right before we could claim the mountaintop.
It felt this way on Saturday night. The Ducks always had the lead, but it felt like Penn State was just about to go on a run and take control of the game — and ruin our season to date.
But the Ducks held on and took the game’s momentum back, and finished strong.
As Duck fans we are just waiting for our dreams to be crushed, and history supports this feeling. Going back to the Chip Kelly era, it is easy to see why Duck fans can’t quite believe the 2024 run. We have had good teams, but those teams have never finished the job. We have also had a lot of years of forgettable teams that failed to live up to their potential.
So let’s take a look at the past 14 years of Duck football and exorcise the demons that continue to haunt us.
New Heights
The Ducks have only gone undefeated once other time in program history, in 2010, and that season ended with a three point loss to Auburn. We can all revisit Michael Dyer being down later (he was, by the way). That and many other missed calls resulted in an Oregon loss. The Kelly years brought us hope unmatched as a program and we knew we could reach it all.
DeAnthony Thomas runs for a big touchdown against the Badgers in the 2012 Rose Bowl.
(Photo By: Amazing Moments Photography)
2011: Oregon wins the Pac-12 and makes the Rose Bowl. In a massive showdown with the Wisconsin Badgers, led by Bret Bielema and Russell Wilson, the Ducks duel it out for four quarters before securing their first Rose Bowl win in more than a generation. This felt like the Ducks were finally making their mark in the modern era of football.
2012: The Ducks lost to Stanford in overtime by three points. Winning that game would have put an undefeated Oregon team against an undefeated Notre Dame team in the National Championship Game — a game that most believe Oregon would have won. Instead it was a one-loss Alabama team that was given the privilege of destroying the Fighting Irish.
2013: The season was promising but sidelined due to Marcus Mariota’s knee injury. Our consolation prize was an Alamo Bowl win against Texas.
2014: Objectively the best year in Oregon football. The Ducks won the Pac-12 and Rose Bowl and Mariota won the Heisman. The Ducks reached the National Championship only to be utterly dismantled by Ohio State. We watched Ezekiel Elliott rush for what felt like a million yards and a third-string quarterback throw deep balls we couldn’t stop.
We had too many injuries and we just didn’t have the linemen to compete. It was a crushing loss at the end of such a promising year, and a reminder that the Ducks didn’t have the players to compete with a team like Ohio State.
2015: We saw Oregon experiment with the modern transfer quarterback in Vernon Adams. A broken finger in Game 1 derailed a rather promising year and it is interesting to think what could have happened otherwise. The defense had its ups and downs, but was overall rather poor. The whole year could have been summed up in the Alamo Bowl that shall not be named.
The Forgettable Years
2016: The end of the Mark Helfrich era, though there was a bright spot in Justin Herbert. This would bring an end to the coaching continuity at Oregon, but bring a spark of hope in new recruiting heights.
Remember when Oregon beat Michigan State in the 2018 Redbox Bowl 7-6? No? No one does.
(Photo By: Andrew Giesemann)
2017: The Willie Taggart year. It was fine, but it did show that a revamped recruiting effort could bring good results to Oregon. Though with Taggart’s abrupt departure, the class fell apart in a hurry. Taggart did bring Mario Cristobal to the Oregon Ducks.
2018: Cristobal’s first year and nothing worth writing about. In truth, Duck fans could be forgiven for not remembering 2016-18. These three years brought us little in the sense of on-field hope and frankly just wasted Herbert’s potential.
The Cristobal Doldrums
In 2019, Herbert was a senior and the Ducks had a loaded roster after their best recruiting class to date. A loss to Auburn, led by Bo Nix, left a bad taste in the mouths of the Ducks out of the gate. But they put together a solid season and were knocking on the door of a return to the College Football Playoff, when Cristobal did what he always does — managed to find a way to lose a completely winnable game.
The Ducks lost to Arizona State and were eliminated from the College Football Playoff, but were still in the running for the Pac-12. The Ducks faced off against No. 5 Utah, who needed a win against the Ducks to make the playoff. In one of the best Cristobal coached games at Oregon, the Ducks pulled off the upset. They denied the Utes a playoff berth and punched their ticket to the Rose Bowl where they’d face off against the Badgers again.
The Rose Bowl was a pretty typical Cristobal coaching affair. Lots of running the ball into piles of linemen. It didn’t look like the Ducks had ability to out-physical a B1G team. However, Herbert managed to run for all of Oregon’s touchdowns and carried the Ducks to a one-point Rose Bowl win.
Justin Herbert scores against Wisconsin in the 2020 Rose Bowl.
(Photo By: Tom Corno)
Though our playoff hopes were dashed, our hope for a future playoff run was restored.
2020 was a disaster and the Ducks can be forgiven for it.
In 2021, in Game 2 we saw the best game of the Cristobal era. Oregon took out Ohio State in “the Shoe” and out-rushed the Buckeyes to walk away with a seven-point win. This would be Ryan Day’s first loss to the Ducks. The rest of the season would become a gross disappointment with a loss to Stanford and two blowout losses to Utah.
Oregon fan morale was at an all-time low. Cristobal had left the program for Miami, the recruiting class was falling apart, and poor coaching had resulted in two embarrassing losses in less than a month. In the Cristobal era the Ducks had failed to reach their potential.
The Lanning Era
There has been something different about the Lanning era, and that’s been growth. Lanning is a young coach and he is still learning on the job, but what is absolutely clear is that in Year 3 of the Lanning era he has learned more about coaching than Cristobal ever did (though our hopes for a playoff return in 2022 and 2023 were dashed by our most loathed rival, the Washington Huskies).
But this season feels different. The Ducks have had close games this year, but strangely it never felt like the Ducks were out of control — at least not in retrospective.
Even now as the Ducks sit at No. 1 in the country and have the top seed in the playoff, Duck fans feel uneasy. The format of the CFP has done Oregon no favors, as our reward for being the top-ranked team in the country is to play the winner of Ohio State and Tennessee in the Rose Bowl. Oregon has the hardest path, at No.1, to the National Championship this year.
It feels appropriate for Duck fans to panic and reflect on all our failed seasons over the past 14 years.
But with Dan Lanning and this battle-tested roster on the field, it feels like more fans are giving in to hope than our trauma of past seasons. The Ducks aren’t done yet, and are just three wins away from the promised land.
David Marsh
Portland, Oregon
Top Photo By Eric Becker
Natalie Liebhaber, the FishDuck.com Volunteer Editor for this article, works in technology in SLC, Utah.
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David Marsh is a high school social studies teacher in Portland, Oregon. As a teacher he is known for telling puns to his students who sometimes laugh out of sympathy, and being both eccentric about history and the Ducks.
David graduated from the University of Oregon in 2012 with Majors in: Medieval Studies, Religious Studies, and Geography. David began following Ducks Football after being in a car accident in 2012; finding football something new and exciting to learn about during this difficult time in his life. Now, he cannot see life without Oregon football.