Never has a war been so one sided, never has a rivalry been so lopsided. Once heralded as an annual “border war” between Oregon and Washington, the Ducks vs. Dubs annual game has now turned into a mockery of what was a once a classic rivalry. The war is officially over, the rivalry is officially dead. As an Oregon born …
Football players and coaches will tell you to the man that there’s no such thing as a “good loss.” They’re all wrong! The Oregon Ducks’ loss to Arizona State on November 23rd, 2019 was not just a good loss, it was a great loss, and I’m here to convince you. As I said in this article way back on January …
Oregon will be in the 2019 playoffs, as some of us here have been talking about 2019 since early in the 2017 season. We discussed how after a steady rebuild, and if Justin Herbert came back for his senior season, we’d have a chance to play for championship. Given the performance of 2018, and the level of player and coaching …
I forgive you for thinking that the Ducks would return to glory in 2018. I forgive you for thinking that they would be Crist-o-ballin’ back to the Rose Bowl or maybe even the playoffs. And I forgive your twitter hyperbole and article comments of anticipatory grandeur, despite the fact that it was delusional to expect such a drastic turnaround in …
Momentum is the quantity of motion of a moving body, measured as a product of its mass and velocity. Momentum. Velocity. Mass. All factors that led to the Ducks losing four out of the last five games, and three straight losses. As Justin Herbert stretched across the goal line against California, a slightly late defender who’d already committed his energy …
It’s late in 2019, and another Oregon Ducks football season has just ended. The morning has broken gray and gloomy, rain flinging itself against the glass facade of the Hatfield-Dowlin Complex as if delivering a million tiny blows from an angry sky. Willie Taggart swivels his desk chair to look out of his rain-dappled window onto the practice fields. The …
“Know they self, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories.” This quote from Sun Tzu speaks not of the past, but of the future. Likewise, the Oregon Ducks football program must not only look forward, but move forward – as a coaching staff, as a team, and more importantly, as a culture. That forward-looking and moving culture must …
We can point to just a few plays this last season that would have resulted in a winning record, a bowl game and likely the extension of the Mark Helfrich era (for better or worse). Let’s look at the season and our five stages of fan grief: sadness, depression, denial, disbelief, and finally, blame. To say this last season was …
There’s no questioning that Chip Kelly revolutionized not just the Oregon offense, but college football itself. While Mark Helfrich largely sustained that offensive success with quarterback Marcus Mariota, since he left for the NFL we have seen gradual changes to the Oregon offense. The question today, as Oregon struggles on all fronts, is, are we witnessing the demise of the …
Over the past 50 years or so there have been many great teams in the Pac-8/10/12, but only a few teams have risen to the top to dominate the conference over an extended time period. There are common threads among the teams that dominated and unique outliers as well. Coaching, a matter of “no small disturbance” in Oregon right now …
Is this season a lost cause? Many fans are already asking the question, just five games into a 12-game season. The struggles have been well documented. The defense not getting any consistent pressure, the linebackers out of position, missed tackles at every level. The offense humming one minute, then pedestrian the next. Repeated attempts to run up the middle despite …
It used to be that Oregon fans made light of the other teams in the Pac-12 for their roller coaster seasons. You know the ones I’m talking about. Where they have pre-season hopes, maybe some hype around a returning quarterback or running back, maybe even a pre-season ranking, then fall flat on their face against some middling competition. Only they …