With this week’s unceremonious ouster of Oregon State from the Pac-12 Basketball Tourney, the Ducks have once again plunged a knife into the soul of our friends from Corvallis. I, for one, feel bad. It must be hard to be a Beaver over the last, oh, 100 years. Much is made of the fact that Oregon State’s Head Coach is …
The College of Cardinals, er, the NCAA wasted valuable time this week, time that would have been better served making compliance more arcane and difficult. Brought before this august body was the suggestion that college football offenses should be prohibited from running plays within the first 10 seconds of the play clock. The thought, from Nick Saban’s mouth to God’s …
As Oregon’s 2013 football season came to a close, the majority opinion was, “the sooner the better.” It’s a testament to how high the bar has been raised at Oregon that another double-digit win season, capped with a bowl victory, was cause for disappointment. However, amid the gloom, hope for next season came when quarterback Marcus Mariota and his teammates, …
Over the past decade, Oregon’s rushing attack has set the standard in college football. This has been particularly evident since the arrival of Chip Kelly as offensive coordinator in 2007, as the Ducks have finished in the Top-10 nationally in rushing during each of the past seven seasons, a truly remarkable feat. Dating all the way back to the early …
It is the marquee event of NFL Draft process: the NFL Scouting Combine, or the “Underwear Olympics,” to which it has been casually referred, of which four years of college production can become virtually ignored in favor of a limited sample of data collected in the form of physical measurements from arbitrary tasks. So why would college football fans care about this NFL …
The list of college coaches who have transitioned well to the professional level is not a long one, and shorter still is the list of those who have done well right away. Often it’s an inability to deal properly with professional players, other times the intense demands of the job are more than the coach is prepared for. Still other …
We are hard up against the 2014 Academy Awards and this one is going to be particularly exciting. The Big Fish pulled some strings and FishDuck has been invited to appear on the red carpet for the awards. This year’s roster of Best Picture nominees is one of the main reasons why we were selected to attend. Never have there …
With an all-time top ten list featuring players like Derek Loville, Saladin McCullough, Reuben Droughns, Jonathan Stewart, LaMichael James and Kenjon Barner — the Oregon football program has always done well with running backs. The way they have been used has evolved over the years, but the emphasis on stocking the backfield with high quality players remains unaltered. The iron-man-bell-cow-three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust …
Dear Coach Saban, Thanks to you and your friends, the NCAA, recently announced they would be considering a rules change to prevent offensive units from snapping the ball during the first 10 seconds of the 40-second play clock, thus allowing defensive units to make substitutions during that time and ostensibly promote the safety of the players. It comes up for …
Disingenuous, adjective: “Not truly honest or sincere: giving the false appearance of being honest and sincere.” (From the Merriam-Webster online dictionary.) They should call it the Bret Bielema rule. Or perhaps the Bielema-Saban rule, since it is, in part, due to these two coaches’ influence that this rule is now being considered. For those who are unfamiliar with this proposal, …
The perks of working for FishDuck.com are ridiculous. I’m writing this from my timeshare week in Aspen, and its less than a month after this Super Bowl party: But there comes a time, every year, when we have to pay the piper for all of these perks. When tax season rolls around free-lance writers take it up the . . …
Two of the signature days on the football calendar brought the season to a close last week. The first was last Sunday in the form of the Super Bowl, sport’s biggest spectacle, but also one of the truest meritocracies; the team that executes better on the field wins, and does so by presumably having the best combination of player talent …