Oregon’s annual Spring Game will kick off the 2016/17 football pre-season for our beloved Ducks. The highly-anticipated action at Autzen Stadium should make for a very intriguing springtime Saturday. After every season another exciting group of players leaves the University to seek illustrious careers in the NFL, thus leaving us with a bunch of questions heading into the spring game. With alumni …
I was 10 years old in 1957 when the Soviet Union launched the first man-made satellite, Sputnik. I can tell you with certainty that Uncle Sammy’s reaction to being eclipsed technologically by the Red Menace was far more tepid than the SEC’s response to college football (CFB) satellite camps. The U.S. turned to NASA to bridge the gap. The SEC …
Oregon’s pitching has not been great. The highly touted rotation has pitched well, but has failed to reach the levels we expected back in February. The bullpen is questionable, as well. As mentioned last week, the back-end is set, but as evidenced by the madness of the Oregon State game Monday night, the long-relievers/spot starters are anything but a sure …
The 2016 preseason Top 25 college football (CFB) polls, including ESPN’s FPI rankings that we reviewed last week, are pounding down the Pac-12. In the four ‘big time’ polls, the putative 2016 champion Stanford Cardinal is ranked as follows: ESPN 8; FOX Sports 11; Sports Illustrated 11 and CBS 14. The Oregon Ducks are not ranked higher than 20 in any of these polls. …
The Ducks have pitching weapons in reserve. The heavy and light arms will have to continue to move Oregon forward until the punchless offense decides whether they are committed to the “small ball” approach of years past or if George Horton has decided to blaze a new trail for the second half of the year. Optimism about surging bats and …
Any college football (CFB) fan with anything more than a passing interest in the game knows that it is next to impossible to escape CFB’s ESPN media supremacy including The Worldwide Leader’s ubiquitous prediction machine, the Football Power Index (FPI). In the near future I will be offering up my preseason 2016 CFB Dandy Dozen; the 12 teams that I believe …
Nearly a month and a half into the season the Ducks have not flown as high as I had hoped this winter. But their performance has been more in line with what we had expected. The pitching staff has performed well and the offense is still finding their groove. After the 10-1 shellacking of Portland on Wednesday evening, there is …
Head trauma, including Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) damage and player safety, in general, are major areas of concern today in both the NFL and in college football (CFB). With parents and guardians concerned about head injuries, participation in youth football continues to decline. In response, a number of youth leagues have eliminated tackling in both practice and in games. The Ivy League recently eliminated live tackling in …
My friends – I went looking for information about Duke basketball, and ran into an article that just dumped all the material you can to brag about a team into one compact view. The post was supposed to be about the match-up between the Ducks and Blue Devils, but it was all about their tradition, their great coach, the plaudits …
Mr. Lawrence Scott Commissioner, Pacific 12 Conference 360 3rd Street, 3rd Floor San Francisco, CA 94107 Dear Mr. Commissioner, As a graduate of John Harvard’s University, I am reasonably certain that somewhere along your educational path you studied the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. The law that tells you ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ has to be one of …
The Ducks struggled in their trip through SEC country last week. Each of the starters posted his shortest outing of the year as Oregon skidded into its first losing streak of 2016. The series in Starkville gave head coach George Horton an opportunity to trot out his bullpen as the long relievers begin to solidify their roles. The problem the bullpen …
Perhaps Tulsa should not be in the field? Perhaps Monmouth, South Carolina, St. Bonnies and St. Mary’s should be in? But it’s not as if any team left out is a true threat to be cutting down the nets in Houston. And it is hard to feel sorry for ‘mid-major’ conference regular season champions left out because they did not also win their …