Sissy Blue Shirts: Pac-12 Check
Big timed by the Big Sky. The Art of Couging It. And everything else in between.
Welcome to the good, the bad, and the badder, of the Pacific 12 Conference. From the perspective of a Duck fan/West Coast enthusiast.
My Oregon-Ohio State Game Preview comes out on Friday morning, so jump on the Ditch Rich train while you can.
After replacing Larry Scott with a seemingly actually competent commissioner, George Kliavkoff, it felt like the Pac-12 was basically heading in the right direction. Generally. In the big picture.
But the problem with the big picture, is that it’s usually the thing someone points to when they want to distract you from looking at all the really bad little pictures right in front of you.
The Good: Chip Kelly finally beat an SEC team not named Tennessee.
UCLA was the hero of the conference this week, as the Bruins took down the 16th-ranked LSU Tigers. Now, LSU was probably given too high of a preseason ranking judging by their poor 2020, but Coach O and his Tigahs are still probably a good candidate for finishing the season in somewhere between 21st-25th.
LSU’s over-ranking shouldn’t take anything away from Chip Kelly’s new team, however. They looked as good as I told you they’d be in my Pac-12 preview, and they might have even looked a little better.
UCLA leaned on their bruising rushing duo of Zach Charbonnet (11 carries for 117 yds) and Brittain Brown (17-69 yds), and managed to get a really fine passing performance from QB Dorian Thompson-Robinson (260 yds, 3 TD, 1 INT) on their way to a 38-27 primetime victory in Pasadena.
Chip’s offense looked like Chip’s offense, and the Bruins looked like serious contenders for the South & Beyond.
The Bad: The whole Pac-12 North looked rough.
We already know that Oregon had to squeeze one out against Fresno State, but who would’ve thunk that the Ducks’ performance would still be the “best” across the whole division?
Oregon State never quite got things going on the road at Purdue. - They’ll get better, but still.
Stanford looked bad-bad against Kansas State (also something I predicted in my preview). - They probably won’t get better this year.
Cal disappeared in the second half and lost a heart breaker to a kind of good Nevada team. - Wilcox’s seat getting lukewarm?
Wazzu Coug’d It and were outscored 15-3 in the fourth to lose to Utah State. - Do your own research on that loss, Coach Rolo.
And the other team in the North belongs in…
The Baddest: Montana has accepted their re-invitation to the conference.
I’m not going to do a whole bunch of grave-stomping on ol’ Warshington, a 13-7 home loss to FCS Montana has surely done enough damage, but I wouldn’t be me—and this wouldn’t be Ditch Rich—if I didn’t mention the Griz.
Montana is an original member of the Pacific Coast Conference, and it seems as though the bad karma from when UDub manipulated Montana’s school president to vote Oregon out of the Rose Bowl in 1925 has now finally come back to bite the dog in the tail.
Something is rotten on Montlake, clearly. I think they’re paying a bad coach and a bad offensive coordinator a bad amount of money, but that still doesn’t explain why a program with their resources and their profile should only score seven points on an FCS team.
The whole apparatus seems to smell worse than a warm day at Pike Place Market. But you won’t hear me complaining too much about it.
That sums up Week One for the Pac. Here’s hoping, praying, dreaming that Week Two is brighter.
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Go Ducks.
It's perfectly fine to celebrate Day of the Dead a little early so dancing on the grave is in order. Over the years, the Huskies have been unbearably arrogant and insufferable. But the truth is that they had some feathers to back it up. As we know that shit ended about 25 years ago so all of the whining, boasting about fake NC's, "player development", legit north division champs, little bro, etc., is just empty. Truth is the body is a quarter century cold. And just the whispers of those old days swirl around 'the greatest venue in college football'.
As a child, a Coug fan tried to throw a beer bottle at my head...so to this day, every time Wazzu Cougs it, I take extra joy knowing that fan is probably somewhere out there, taking a beer bottle to the heart.