Oregon's Final Visit To The Bay

A vintage Big Ten-ACC clash.

I know some of you are new to Ditch Rich as of this week, and I’d like to welcome you. Go tell your friends about it. We’re having a lot of fun here.

The current email schedule is a weekly game preview every Friday where we take a quick look back at the last game, crack a few jokes, and then look ahead.

On Wednesday I dropped a pure Colorado recap because—no offense to Stanford—it just felt yucky to bury my takeaways from that game in a preview of the 1-3 Cardinal.*

*The 1-3 Cardinal who historically eat us alive whenever we play them in Stanford** after emotional wins.

**And yes, we go over this every other year, but thanks to realignment this is now my last chance to remind you that Stanford University is located in the census-designated place of Stanford, California, and not in Palo Alto as some lazy announcers might have lead you to believe over the years.

But before we dig into the Ducks’ journey through ACC country, I have just one final thought to wrap the Colorado game in a nice little bow:

I can’t believe I didn’t make this parallel earlier, but the experience of being in Autzen on Saturday felt nearly identical to the 2009 Cal game. That was also a conference opener and the Ducks pounded the sixth-ranked Golden Bears 42-3 on a picture-perfect Eugene day. Ed Dickson scored three TDs and it felt decisive and nationally important. But Cal was over-ranked and ended up sucking that year anyway so people hardly remember it.

I have a feeling we’ll probably look back at the CU game in a few years with the same kind of fun-fact-edness.

When we look towards tomorrow’s matchup down on The Farm, there are a few things to know about this year’s Stanford team:

First, they have a new head coach, Troy Taylor, who came over from FCS Sacramento State.

Second, the Cardinal actually played Sac State two weeks ago and lost.

There is a special place in the Pac-12 trash bin reserved for losers that lose to Big Sky teams, and now The ‘Ferd has the unique honor of being the last, glorious group to do it.

Presented, without comment.

On defense, Stanford is 111th in the country in points allowed, tied for 93rd in red zone defense, tied for 73rd in total sacks, and has forced just two turnovers all year.

Some of those stats are skewed by the fact that the Trees lost 56-10 to USC, but they also played really bad teams like Hawaii, Sac State, and Arizona. All of that to say that Oregon’s offense should roll like no offense has ever rolled before.

Without Noah Whittington, I’m excited to see if either Dante Dowdell or the never-Husky Jayden Limar can rise to fill the role of RB3 or if we pivot to a 1-2 punch with just Bucky and Jordan.

I personally think this game is the perfect chance to get Limar his reps—just like he did in the Portland State game. I would like nothing more than to let him step up tomorrow, and then in two weeks he can come home to Seattle and do something LaMichael James-esque against the Huskies.***

***I’m getting ahead of myself with that hope, but October 14th might just be the game of the century so I’m sorry if tomorrow’s game against the nerds doesn’t sufficiently distract me from that fact!

The Stanford offense is also still coming together.

They have two quarterbacks—which means they don’t have one—with Ashton Daniels (probably their better option for them in the long run) and Syracuse transfer Justin Lamson.

There’s no telling which one we’ll see more of tomorrow, but I do know that both 6’2” sophomores will probably take off and run a good amount.

The Ducks “struggled” against the QB run in the Texas Tech game, and I say “struggled” because Shough’s 100+ yards on the ground were really bolstered by a single rush of 50+. Other than that run, I’m skeptical about the current narrative that the designed run is a bonafide Weakness™ for Oregon.

I guess they have a chance to prove me right tomorrow.

Lastly, I regret to inform you that Stanford has yet another cornfed, NFL-ready tight end that is sure to test us on a million jump balls tomorrow.

Ben Yurosek is 6’4”, 242 lbs and is probably the best football player on their roster.

It’ll be a test of discipline and craft for our defense—especially if they manage to get Jamal Hill or Jeff Bassa matched up on him. We need to end the current penalty trend we’ve been on and it starts with being able to shut down a size mismatch like that without covering the field with pass interference flags.

The Ducks are favored by 27 points tomorrow, so this preview is probably not being critical enough about how bad Stanford really is, but this is an old fashioned “handle your business” game.

We are 2-3 as a program the last five times we’ve gone down to The Farm, so I’ll just breathe easy if it’s a normal, unremarkable blowout.

Oregon 56, Stanford 17.

Go Ducks.