Are The Ducks A Top 11 Team?

People are saying they are.

Highlighted teams are opponents currently on Oregon’s 2022 schedule.

Hey Duck fans, it’s been a minute.

The 2021 Oregon season ended with quite the whimper, and although The Letter didn’t kill me, the discourse about The Letter nearly did.

But then the other night—after I watched AB throw for 117 yards in his first three possessions of professional football—I was brought back from the brink.

And just like that, football was here again.

By the grace of some higher power, we all managed to wake up this morning to the sun in the east, and the soothing knowledge that Mario Cristobal is finally going to waste some other team’s very competent quarterback for a change.

Dan Lanning’s first fall camp is in full swing, the starting quarterback conversation continues to break new ground—same as it does every year—and the Oregon-Georgia game tickets officially dropped into the Ticketmaster account just last week. Atlanta is a little over two weeks away.

I’ll be there, and you can expect a Bourdain-level travel report about Waffle House upon my return.

The other big news is that the first AP Poll dropped today—giving us the most official and still-way-too-early outlook on how the 2022 college football season will play out.

The Ducks landed in the 11th spot, which I think is pretty generous, actually.

With a first-year head coach, a brand new staff, a transfer quarterback, and the big stage failures of last December, I could’ve easily seen Oregon falling as far back as the 18-20 range.

Of course, preseason polls are a hilarious exercise anyway.

The top two or three teams are almost always pretty right—in this year’s case, Alabama, Ohio State, and Georgia, in that order.

But every other ranking after that is essentially a total guessing game. Most of it is just based on vibes (or maybe in our case, a way to add hype to big non-conference games).

Teams like Miami/USC can pretty much average anywhere between 4-7 wins a year over the last decade, and you can still set your watch every August that they’ll somehow be seen as a top 15 team all over again.

That’s called the Dallas Cowboy effect.

Along with UGA, Oregon also has 7th-ranked Utah and 25th-ranked BYU on the schedule. U$C was the only other Pac team to crack these rankings, and they aren’t even in the conference anymore so they don’t really count.

Now, if I didn’t already exhaust you by somehow finding a way to defend AB in the first three sentences of this newsletter, I’d like to humbly welcome you all back to Ditch Rich.

It’s a new season. We have a new coach to Ditch, a brand new QB to scapegoat, and a whole bunch of Waffle House to eat—win or lose.

Go Ducks.