The Bryan Addison Revenge Game
The Ducks start hot, and then sleepwalk through a blowout win.
Somewhere between the third quarter of the Boise game and that Bryan Addison pick-six, Oregon’s offense was humming.
They were explosive, balanced, and just plain kickin’ ass.
But something changed during that Once-A-Duck interception that switched the Oregon offense back into Idaho mode for a little bit, and it has left some fans out there a bit frustrated.
If you’re looking to assign your frustrations to something, you might say this team got complacent and lazy after taking such a big lead; or they were making some business decisions in order to avoid some weirdly dirty plays from UCLA; or you might think that Will Stein is actually just Marcus Arroyo in disguise—maliciously tanking Oregon one screen pass at a time.
While (almost) all those things might be true, I’m not so sure that any of those are actually larger problems with this football team going forward.
The offense still performed at a high enough level to blowout a bad team, and the defense didn’t give up a touchdown.
Personally, I’m mostly frustrated that BA’s pick-six became such a permanent image in my mind, and then the Ducks didn’t do anything special in the second half to replace that image for me.
I wanted a palate-cleansing 65-yard touchdown run by Jordan James in the third quarter to make everything alright, and I unfortunately didn’t get that.
Otherwise, the facts of the game say that Oregon won by three scores on the road in a conference game.
We out-gained UCLA 431 to 172 and held the Bruins to just one of ten on third down.
Dillon Gabriel threw for 278 yards and three touchdowns (and yes, one really bad decision).
It may not have felt super wonderful the whole time, but this wasn’t anything close to an Idaho-level stinker, this was just a team that saw the way the game was going and took their foot off the gas.
Dan saw his star tight end leave with an apparent head injury in the first half and watched his quarterback flail around at midfield trying to make a touchdown-saving tackle.
He decided that he didn’t care about covering the spread, and that he’d rather make it out of there alive. So he told Stein to go into Super Screen Pass Mode, and he told Phil Knight to fire up the jets so they could make like a tree and get the hell out of there.
Much like your dad at the end of a concert, Oregon put on their jackets during the encore and just got ready to sprint up the stairs and run for the exits the second the band played their last note.
Honestly, it felt like UCLA even got to that point after Garbers got hobbled, too.
Tez earned himself co-Big Ten Offensive Player of the Week, JJ rushed for over 100 yards again, and Jeff Bassa looked healthy as a horse not named Barbaro.
It was a good outing, no matter how much you might hate when we throw another screen pass for another two yard loss (and another twenty-five seconds off the clock).
I’ve said it before, but it’s a long season—potentially the longest in Oregon history—and we’re going to play a few more bad Big Ten teams that won’t be worth running up the score against.
With the twelve-team playoff, style points don’t exist anymore.
We spent the entire BCS/four-team playoff era so concerned about our conference’s perception and winning blowouts in some undefined “convincing” fashion, but only G6 teams need to worry about that stuff now.
All we have to do about is keep winning.
I do think we (read: anyone not named Jordan James) need to run the ball a little better, and since the screen passes ain’t going anywhere any time soon, the perimeter blocking has to get a lot better, too.
But our defense is playing at an elite level—lowercase “e” until they hold a top team to under twenty-ish points—and our offense proved it has a supersonic mode by scoring points in fourteen of seventeen non-kneeling drives over their last eight quarters of play.
We’re good at football, and our leaders know full well that we only have a short week before playing a young, dynamic QB on a Friday night against one of only three head coaches that Dan has ever lost to.
But we’ll cross that footbridge when we get to it later this week.
Go Ducks.
And if—after all that politely-served perspective—you’re still bothered by the screens behind the line of scrimmage, Tyson Alger just published this great piece breaking down the subject over on the I-5 Corridor, I encourage you to go give it a read:
