Monday Game Review: Living in The Beaver State
Oregon State invited Oregon into a characteristically empty Reser Stadium, just to hand the Ducks their first loss of 2020.
Every season has that one game. The game that wakes you up to the reality of what kind of team you have on your hands.
After everything gets exposed—on both sides of the ball—in exactly the wrong ways. The opponent had all the juice, all the motivation, and you clearly failed to Respect™ them enough.
You sit back in all the post game pain, trying to remember all the warning signs you ignored—the weaknesses you saw but argued away for one reason or another. Think back to that one game that was much closer than it should have been, but you told yourself that, “even the 2010 team only beat Cal 15-13.” “Early season jitters.” “Everyone has games like that.”
Maybe you even bitterly remember saying, “a win is a win.”
Black Friday started out alright enough.
Tyler Shough and his offensive weapons helped the Ducks take a lead, but neither side of the ball decided they could keep it.
Beavs’ running back Jermar Jefferson stamped himself as the best in the Pac by gashing Oregon’s defense to the tune of 226 yards and 2 touchdowns. Jefferson set the tone of the night on his first drive with a monster 82-yard bomb run—and the pain just kept coming after that.
I felt like my preview had paid Jermar adequate credit. He was already on a tear this season, and I was well-afraid of what that success meant for the rush-weaknesses of the Ducks. But I wrongly imagined that simple adjustments in defensive scheme and the return of Noah Sewell could hold the line.
It turns out that if the Ducks wanted any chance at stopping JJ & The Beavs they needed to resurrect the ghosts of Troy Dye, TJ Ward, Nick Reed, and probably Casey Matthews, for good measure.
Tackling at the first level was yet again a struggle for the Ducks D. On the off chance they made some headway into the Beav o-line, Jefferson shucked away would-be tacklers easily and often.
I talked about tackling and penetration in a few game reviews, and I felt like I was being critical enough—leaving room to see some improvement. But Friday night was tough to watch in that regard. The defense was essentially a brief mist to the Beavers, and even they could find the end zone through that. Hand up, I didn’t take the failings or mistakes seriously when they peeked through early on.
The Ducks weren’t without their flashes, though. KT got his first sack of the season—and batted down some Gebbia passes. Sewell looked all healthy with two tackles for loss, and played with the most fire of anyone in a Duck uniform.
But none of that was enough to make up for the inability to stop the run, or for the secondary to tighten up all the same mid-level passing gaps they showed in the UCLA game.
The Oregon-UCLA game tape pretty much gave Jonathan Smith & Co. the blueprint for beating the Ducks, and they played to it very well. You can thank Chip for that.
In more heartwrenching news, my guy Cam Lewis kicked off a good game, but lost the placekicking gig.
Ditch Rich special teams analyst, Jordan Patin, poses some interesting inquiries on Henry Katleman's 33-yd FG:
“Will Katleman be successful because he has an Aiden Schneider Stache? Maybe there is a correlation between FG % and upper lip facial hair?”
I guess Cam just couldn’t make No Shave November his month, but Henry’s growth, promotion, and success are clearly well-earned. I wish he would’ve gotten a chance to tie the game up.
And full credit to Oregon State. I Respected™ and ragged on them all last week, and any Beaver fan that feels it fit to give it right back to me has every right to do so. It’s easy to look at your own team and be self-critical, rather than credit your rival with a good game. They played better, and were the better team.
But for maybe the first game of the season, I think Tyler Shough really regressed toward the end. He had a trend of improving along with Moorhead’s offense throughout each quarter, but this game slowly slipped out of his hands—despite starting off stellar. His reads, his feel for the game, and his decision making grew more and more suspect in big and little moments as the game went on.
Of course I’m always going to cut the guy some slack in a year like 2020, but of all the warranted and unwarranted praise I’ve thrown his way, his performance in Corvallis was probably the most disappointing of all.
He had been protecting the ball better, he had shown us that he understands how to run JoMo’s RPO. He even started off the game hot, then disappeared into The Fog, and he even kind of returned to take back the lead with 8:27 left. The defense even followed that up with the only stop they needed to make all night.
But then, when the Ducks needed him the most, Shough vanished.
The role of QB1 will always be defined by what you do with the ball when 2:18 is left on the clock.
No matter how many yards you throw, or how many times you fool the cameraman and defenses on a zone read. You have to show up at the end. Whether it’s a fair system or not, that’s the job—quarterbacks make their money in the fourth quarter.
And Young Shough wasn’t up for it on Friday night. I’m not too much of a homer to admit that. Is the whole loss on his shoulders? Not by a Country Club Road mile.
The game of football is a giant collection of performances and mistakes and random acts of God.
But Justin Herbert was knocked and heralded by what he did in the final moments of games. As were Miller, and Musgrave, and Smith, and Harrington, and Thomas, and Mariota.*
(Specific shoutouts to Masoli and V.A., who became Kings because of their clutch genes)
And Shough will be judged by the same metric. He’ll have more chances to prove if his name belongs up next to any of those.
I’m sorry we all have to live in a Beaver State for a whole year, I guess we have to let ‘em have this one.
Losing to the Beavs always hurts. There’s really no sugar coating it. You sit with that hurt for 365 days until you get a chance undo it.
And that pain is compounded by the fact that our Ducks have their backs up against the wall, and need to win out over the next two weeks in order to take the North again.
This certainly isn’t a Playoff team, but it could still be a Pac-12 Champion, and how they respond to this Beaver beating will tell us if they can still reach that goal.
We all know that every season has that one game. The game that reveals what kind of team you have on your hands. But what if I told you that the Ducks weren’t playing in that one game last Friday night.
They’ll be suiting up for that one game this upcoming Saturday, in Berkeley.
What kind of team do we really have?
Tyler Shough and twenty-one of his closest friends have a chance to answer that question.
Go Ducks.