On Clicking & Winning

Even though we were a 21-point favorite, that CU game deserves a standalone recap.

I’m starting to think that I may have fallen victim to media manipulation on a massive scale.

It all happened so fast.

First, Shadeur Sanders had a 510-yard game. Then there was all that “it’s personal” hullabaloo. And then Deion was on 60 Minutes.

I was clicking on everything, and the sports media machine was winning.

And it was this slow morphine drip of Buff propaganda that left me absolutely petrified of a juggernaut that probably never existed in the first place.

Even while I was standing in Autzen Stadium on Saturday—witnessing a colossal 42-6 beat down—it never once occurred to me that this CU team was actually just bad. All I could think was:

“Holy shit, are we THAT good?”

I thought I was watching something absolutely historic. Some kind of special arrival of this Oregon team in front of 10 million sets of eyeballs.*

*All CU hype aside, that was still the most complete game any Oregon team has played in a long time.

But when I tuned into the halftime reports for the OSU-Wazzu and Ohio-ND games, or watched College Football Final that night—where I expected to enjoy a Duck love fest—everyone’s collective reaction seemed to be:

“Well, duh, of course Oregon won big.”

Duh? Duh??

Now, I had heard from a lot of you guys that my 50-49 prediction was weak sauce, so all of my readers have every right to hit me with a: “Dude, it was Colorado, stop overreacting to this win.”

But for ESPN and Fox to sit there and tell me that beating their anointed Buffaloes by 36 points was unremarkable—or for CU alum Chris Fowler to go on Instagram and make fun of Dan Lanning for taking this game too seriously—made me feel gaslit on a scale hitherto undreamt of.

Josh Pate said it best on his show when he said that ESPN and Fox benefit either way when they get to, “pump enough air into the balloon until it pops, and then make fun of it for popping.”

I should’ve known better. I grew up in the age of the internet and I’m usually skeptical of national narratives to a fault. But this Buff magic got me, and I think I’m still coming down from it all.

I didn’t think they were a real playoff contender, and probably not even a real Top Ten team, but in no world did I think they were that pitiful.

And yet, even as I readjust to that run-of-the-mill Buff blowout, I still find myself shocked that our secondary—and defense in general—played so well.

I expected electricity out of Bo & Co., but for our pass rush to sack Shadeur seven times—and for Khyree Jackson to immediately reclaim his title of CB1 just one week after I took it away from him—was the most heartening and enduring sign I think we can take away from Saturday.

There’s a large talent gap between us and Colorado, so our success is hard to truly measure, but for our pass rush and coverage to perform that well against a Good™ QB and generally explosive air attack was a massive step in the right direction for a defense that looked pretty suspect against their only other P5 competition so far.

Jackson himself proved that he still carried plenty of Alabama-energy with him, and his performance should give us all hope that we’ll have someone to cover Washington’s Rome Odunze and USC’s Brenden Rice (now, I’m still not sure what to do about all the other weapons those teams have, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it).

On offense, it unfortunately looks like Noah Whittington might have gotten hurt real bad. The official prognosis from the guy who was sitting in front of me at the game was, “dead leg,” and seeing as how Dan doesn’t discuss injuries, that might be the best information we have.

We’ll miss Noah for sure, and I hope he can heal up soon, but our o-line played so well, and Bucky is so overwhelmingly our RB1 that I still think our run game has arrived—even if CU’s rush defense is miserable.

Our ability to run the ball is what sets us apart from UW and SC. We need to be able to play our bully ball if we’re going to survive this schedule.

---

So that’s it. I was a sucker for the Colorado takeover and it’s forcing me to have a much needed Week Four re-centering.

I can’t play so scared anymore with my predictions, but I also have to be sure to humble myself and not hunger for the immediate applause of ESPN. There is a lot of season left. And in the words of Bo Nix: “Job’s not finished yet. It’s 0-0.”

Stanford preview will be coming on Friday.

Go Ducks.