Noah Sewell, Rush Chairman
Lee Corso in a toga? Sign me up.
Top ten matchups are back in Eugene, and so is the GameDay bus. This is gonna be fun.
8th-ranked UCLA comes to town tomorrow, and the first of three big home tests will begin for the 9th-ranked Ducks.
Will the Duckies just keep rolling? They’ve gotten better and better every week since getting shellacked but Georgia.
But they also kind of haven’t played a good team since Atlanta.
BYU is turning out to be not good, Wazzu is turning out to be even less good than BYU, and Arizona might still grab some surprising wins in Pac-12 play, but they’re still ~2 years ahead of schedule.
Hey, at least Stanford beat Notre Dame last week.
But all those questions about Strength of Schedule will start to melt away if the Ducks can stay hot and beat an even hotter Bruin team, who are coming off of big home wins over Washington (who also might not be super good) and then a decisive victory over Utah, who just toppled USC.
That game was also played in front of ~20,000 people in Westwood—so a much different atmosphere than Autzen on a GameDay-gameday.
But Ch*p is turning the corner in LA—and maybe probably for real this time—and the reason for that can be easily narrowed down to the exceptional play of his super senior quarterback, Dorian Thompson-Robinson.
DTR has probably been the best QB in the conference for the last two years—if not the last three—and he’s been written off by the rest of the conference for far too long.
And on top of his continued success on the field, a huge part to his game this year specifically has been his legitimate swagger and attitude that has him celebrating on the sideline and talking some well-earned shit after making big plays.
You’d be confident too if you had the decade(s)-worth of job security that DTR has enjoyed.
I think a big key to stopping and/or containing a red hot DTR will be some leveling up from our outstanding inside linebackers: Noah Sewell and Justin Flowe.
Both Flowe and Sewell have been in and out with injuries through the first half of the season, but all signs point to a clean bill of health from both of them tomorrow, and it’s about time they start playing like the all-conference/All-American type guys that they are.
It’s not even that they’ve been playing “bad” really even, we just all know that they’re better than what they’ve shown in 2022 so far.
In fact, Justin Flowe’s performance this season has actually reminded me a lot of Haloti Ngata, mostly in a pharmacological sense.
Wildboy Flowe has been flying around, clearly setting up his WWE career, and all-in-all never missing an opportunity to thoroughly celebrate stopping a running back after a three yard gain.
Hey, I’m never gonna complain about energy.
Meanwhile, it has felt like Noah has been just a little behind the play on occasion, and that’s pretty uncharacteristic of him.
My cousin Andy said it best: “I wanna see Noah play more like Flowe, and Flowe play more like Sewell.”
They’ll be asked to spy DTR, drop back in coverage so as to not give him anything easy in the intermediate passing game, and they’ll even rush him on occasion.
Those two will be the reason we can keep Thompson-Robinson from celebrating too much, if we can.
Elsewhere, I feel so good about Oregon’s rush defense, even with Zach Charbonnet running the ball as well as he has been.
The Ducks held Charbonnet to just 35 yards last season in the Rose Bowl, and some naysayers might say “oh but Kayvon was on that team, this defensive line is different blah blah,” but many of those same naysayers spent KT’s entire career talking about how he wasn’t actually a run stopper anyway, so what the hell do they know?
We have the top run defense in the conference, that’s what I know.
And I also know that we have the top run offense in the Pac-12, which once again ends up being the simplest answer I could possibly give you as to why we’re winning this game. And why we’re probably winning by at least 10.
It’s going to be a damp morning in Eugene, and Oregon’s o-line is going to manhandle UCLA’s front—which has admittedly improved a good deal from last season, just haven’t improved enough.
Same old story: Bo, Bucky, and Noah are going run, bump, and burn the Bruins to the tune of ~350 yards on the ground and Bucky will still end up with 97, crushingly shy of his hundo.
Just play within ourselves, soak in all the good juju that comes with College GameDay being in town, and let our All-American linebackers give DTR a hard damn time.
It’ll give him a little bit of fuel for the Pac-12 Title Game, where these two teams just might see each other again.
38-27.
Go Ducks.
Flowe has been a waste of a schollie so far. He needs to settle down and play and lose the "I'm a big deal because I made an arm tackle 5 yds down the field" attitude. Do better or sit.