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Oregon!!! 38 - 34 2 3 315

"LSU" could have a whole new meaning after this loss. I'll let youse all come up with your own conclusions. 😁

Kentucky being unranked says all you need to know about what voters think of A&M. It was a great win for Coach Stein, and I’m happy for him. Hopefully, though, it isn’t cause for putting the cart before the horse.

It would be very interesting to see how well Dylan would perform for us under the pressure of a big game, a big atmosphere, and against much better competition. However, I’m in the same boat as everyone else who thinks Donte has rightfully earned his spot and deserves to be QB1... for now.

Here’s an interesting sportsmanship question. Ohio State was leading Kent State 28 to 0 with three seconds left before halftime. They had the ball and could have simply taken a knee and gone into the locker room with a four touchdown lead. Instead, they took a shot at the end zone. It worked. Touchdown. 35 to 0 at halftime. My first reaction was basically, come on. You’re already up 28 to 0. Take the knee. There’s a long standing idea in sports that once you clearly have an opponent beaten, there comes a point where continuing to aggressively pile on points starts to look less like competition and more like running up the score. But then I started thinking about the other side of it. Three seconds left in the half is an actual football situation. Someday Ohio State could be down by four, five, or six points with three seconds left before halftime, or even at the end of a game, and desperately need that exact play to work. How often do you get to practice that situation against a real defense, in a real stadium, with the clock actually showing three seconds? (Eh em, Michigan) You can practice a Hail Mary a hundred times during the week, but practice is not the same as doing it in a game. The quarterback has to buy enough time. The receivers have to get downfield. The protection has to hold. Everyone has to understand the situation and know that this is the final play. From that perspective, maybe the score almost should not matter. Coaches are supposed to prepare their players for situations they may face later in the season, and this was a rare opportunity to get a real game repetition that you cannot completely recreate on a practice field. At the same time, there is still something that feels a little uncomfortable about doing it when you are already beating an overmatched team 28 to 0. So where is the line? Is taking that shot poor sportsmanship and unnecessarily running up the score? Or is it completely legitimate situational football, using a rare opportunity to practice something that could matter enormously later in the season? I can honestly see the argument both ways. What do you think?

I mean, PSU is terrible 😆... But, nice win Duckies.

Not a single sack? 😔

Oregon!!! 52 – 10 2 turnovers 4 sacks 225 passing yards

I always thought the whole “X’s and O’s / Jimmies and Joes” line was attributed to Lou Holtz, not Rick Neuheisel. Maybe I’ve had that wrong all these years 😬

Both feel generous right now, given how they have played. Let's hope for the best moving forward.

Oops, I jumped to conclusions. That's the coaches poll, not the AP. Corrected

Well, the coaches definitely didn’t pull any punches. Oregon drops 12 spots from No. 6 to No. 18 after the loss at Oklahoma State. Honestly, it’s hard to argue too much with the drop. Losing 39–31 to an unranked Oklahoma State team, especially one coming off the kind of stretch they’ve been on, is a bad loss. Oregon started the year No. 2, slipped to No. 6 after an unimpressive win over Boise State, and now they’re sitting at No. 18. Two games into the season and essentially all of the preseason benefit of the doubt is gone. The interesting part to me is everything happening around them. Texas jumps to No. 1 after knocking off Ohio State, while OSU only falls to No. 6. Indiana is all the way up to No. 4. USC has quietly climbed to No. 11, Penn State is No. 15, and Michigan went from unranked to No. 19 after beating Oklahoma. Washington, meanwhile, is barely hanging on at No. 24 despite being 2–0. For Oregon, some of those moves could actually become important. The Ducks still play No. 11 USC, No. 6 Ohio State, No. 19 Michigan and No. 24 Washington. So as ugly as No. 18 looks right now, the schedule gives them plenty of opportunities to repair the damage. The USC game in two weeks suddenly looks enormous. Take care of Portland State, then go into LA and beat an undefeated No. 11 USC team, and this conversation changes pretty quickly. Lose that one and Oregon is 2–2 with the really difficult portion of the Big Ten schedule still ahead. There’s also a weird silver lining to Ohio State losing. Going into Columbus and beating an undefeated No. 1 Ohio State would obviously have been the dream résumé win, but they’re still No. 6 and very much a marquee opponent. Michigan getting back into the poll helps Oregon’s future résumé too, assuming they keep winning. So No. 18 sucks. There’s no sugarcoating it. But Oregon isn’t remotely out of anything yet. At this point the preseason ranking is irrelevant. They have to earn their way back up, and fortunately, or unfortunately depending on how you look at it, the schedule gives them every opportunity to do exactly that. Beat USC and we’re having a very different conversation on September 27.

Of all the mic drops, this one leaves a crater.

On the part about Dante not going through his progressions and forcing the ball to a favorite receiver instead of taking the open guy, sometimes I wonder if the NFL gets into these guys’ heads a little. Especially when they know NFL reps are there watching. Maybe there’s some pressure to force big plays or get certain guys their numbers instead of just taking what the defense gives them. Probably a wild theory, but these are young guys and they all want to make it to the next level.

I have 3 different dvr recordings. But the good news? I don't want to rewatch that disaster.

I think there may be a “continuity illusion” going on with this team. Because Oregon promoted Drew and Hamp from within, it was easy to look at it as continuity instead of what it really was: replacing both coordinators at the same time. Knowing a system and actually running it on Saturday are two very different things. Play sequencing, recognizing what the other team has figured out, knowing when to abandon something, making adjustments on the fly, and anticipating the counter to your counter are skills that only really get tested when you’re the guy making the decisions. That might also explain why Boise looks a little more significant in hindsight. At the time, that game was easy to dismiss as Week 1 rust. Now we’ve seen two straight games where Oregon has looked strangely disjointed despite having more than enough talent. I also think Oklahoma State was almost the perfect opponent to expose it. Oregon wasn’t really playing the same Oklahoma State team they embarrassed last year. Eric Morris essentially brought a new offense with him, along with a huge roster overhaul and a bunch of his North Texas personnel. Morris had one of the best offenses in the country at North Texas. In other words, the helmet said Oklahoma State, but what Oregon was trying to diagnose and defend was something almost entirely different. And they never really figured it out. That’s the part that concerns me more than the loss itself. Oregon kept making enough individual plays to stay alive, and eventually even took the lead, but they never reached that point where it felt like the coaching staff had figured out what Oklahoma State was doing and taken control of the game. My theory is that the 2026 Ducks have the talent, confidence and expectations of an established national title contender, while underneath all of that they’re effectively a first year operation in two of the most important game management positions on the staff. That would explain why they look so weird right now. They’re talented enough to erase mistakes and deficits. They have enough playmakers to rescue possessions that aren’t working. But they don’t look synchronized enough yet to dictate games. Against Boise, the talent was enough to overcome it. Against Oklahoma State, it almost was again. The good news is that if this theory is right, it’s fixable. Mehringer and Hampton may simply be going through the learning curve that comes with actually running their respective sides of the ball, and Lanning has time to help get it sorted out. But that’s what I’m watching now. Not the rankings, not the loss itself, and not whether they blow out Portland State. I want to see whether Oregon starts looking like a team that is anticipating what opponents are doing instead of reacting to it. If that happens, yesterday might end up being the early season punch in the mouth they needed. If it doesn’t, then losing both coordinators in the same offseason may have been a much bigger deal than any of us realized.

Um... Murphy's law?

Gonna be nice when these boys wake up. 😋

I mean, at least AI is not biased.

Lanning and his staff have seemed to struggle when facing the same opponent for a second time, particularly when adjustments and counter-adjustments become a larger part of the game. However, I have faith that they've recognized those shortcomings, learned from their mistakes, and will continue to grow as a coaching staff. The best coaches evolve through experience, and I believe they'll overcome this issue in the near future.

The confidence with which these conclusions are presented is exceeded only by their apparent detachment from the available evidence.

It was political and I didn't want to bring it up here. But it was a bunch of bologna.

A bit of silly fun. Not sure if it's the real Herbie, but my comment was essentially calling out a bogus Facebook post... I choose to believe it was really him 😏🦆 Happy Saturday!

Well that was... a spring game.

Gratz, fiddy. 😏