Your Oregon Ducks Are Number One

Dan & Tosh get their shutout.

So that was supposed to be our Terrifying Big Ten Trap Game?

Give me a break.

Oregon traveled across the country to play a seemingly garbage Purdue team on a short week after an emotional win, and they did exactly what they were supposed to do: won 35-0.

We were forged in the fires of Stanford, Arizona State, and Pac-12 After Dark.

It’s going to take a whole lot more than a little choo-choo train to kill us.

After tons of scoreless quarters and halves, Dan & Tosh’s defense finally put it all together and got their long-awaited shutout. It was a testament to great team defense, stellar secondary play, and one of Oregon’s best turnover-forcing games of the year.

Sure, the box score says that Purdue ran for 208 yards and 5.2 ypc, but you shouldn’t worry about that one bit.

I wrote in my preview that it wouldn’t surprise me if the travel schedule and the short week negatively affected our rush defense, and that Purdue could easily run better than Ohio did against us.

Oregon gave up a few medium-sized runs, but they never gave up anything explosive, and they clearly sold out on 3rd and 4th downs, holding Purdue to a measly 4 of 15.

Ideally, Dan and the team will learn a thing or two from this roadtrip and how it impacted their tackling and their legs.

Maybe the boys need to drink more water, sleep with mouth tape, or implement any other number of changes to hack their circadian rhythms. I can only hope that Lanning gets Andrew Huberman on the phone, ASAP.

Whatever the solution is, it would be nice to see those changes in place ahead of our November road games at Michigan and Wisconsin (and possibly on a return trip to Indianapolis).

But it was a shutout, and those don’t come around often, so that’s literally the maximum amount I’m allowed to “complain” about it.

Our offense jumped out to a huge lead and then went on airplane mode once again—something we’re going to have to get used to with Big Ten Dan.

Dillon threw a bad pick and Andrew Boyle missed a 50-yard field goal, but on the bright side, we scored touchdowns 100% of the time we got the ball down into the red zone.

Oregon is currently ranked 103rd in the country in red zone scoring, so it was nice to finally have a get-right game in that department.

Young guys like Kenyon Sadiq and Justius Lowe made some great plays as they filled in for Ferguson and Holden—one was out due to a surprise appendectomy, the other was out due to being full of spit (or not full of enough spit).

And Jordan James had another fine day at the office with two touchdowns, but then Dan let him rest for the entire second half.

Which brings me to the topic of Noah Whittington.

Whenever he’s come in this season as RB2, he’s seemed hesitant to plant on his newly-recovered knee, and his production has severely lacked because of it.

He’s absolutely an offensive weapon that we can and should use—he just caught an incredible receiving touchdown for crying out loud—but there was something about Jay Harris’ late-game appearance on Friday night that just scratched my brain the right way.

And I want to be very careful here because a core tenet of Ditch Rich is that simply calling for the backup is a lazy and ignorant brand of analysis most of the time.

Most of the time.

To my credit, I’ve waited to say something until 1) October 21st, and 2) I had actually watched the guy play in a game for us, but when I saw Harris’ 6-foot-2, 200-pound frame hit the hole with authority and plow downhill into the end zone, it wasn’t hard to recognize that Oregon’s rushing attack has been sorely missing a beefy curveball just like him.

Yes, it happened in garbage time, and yes, Noah is probably still a better top-to-bottom running back, but there’s something to be said about forcing the defense to have to prepare for two entirely different types of runners, and not just Jordan James and Jordan James Lite.

This isn’t a call to make Jay RB2, and to drop Noah down to RB3, but it might be a call to make Jay and Noah co-RB2s.

There are surely some short yardage, jumbo package situations where Jordan might need a rest, and where Jay would be the right ballcarrier for the job instead of Noah, and I hope the small flash of Jay we got last Friday is enough to get him just a few more touches as our Big Ten schedule beefs up.

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The Ducks’ dominant win was also followed by another chaotic day in college football.

And by virtue of Texas’ home loss to Georgia, your Oregon Ducks have recently been named the No. 1 team in the country by the AP Poll.

There’s a lot of football left to play, but it’s been twelve long years—before that, basically a lifetime—since we could say those words, and it wouldn’t hurt if we soaked in that accomplishment just a little bit.

Welcome to the top, Duck fans, let’s stay awhile, huh?

Go Ducks.