No matter what the explanation, Oregon isn’t the feared team with the steamroller offense that dominated the PAC-12 from 2009-2012 (Scott Olmos-USA TODAY Sports photo).
Oregon had a wonderful run on top of the PAC-12 Conference. They won three straight conference titles. They won 12 games three years in a row, and they won two BCS bowls. They made it to a national championship game.
Under Chip Kelly, the Ducks built a West Coast dynasty, 51-7 in this decade, the best mark in college football.
All dynasties crumble.
In 2011, the PAC-12 Conference signed a lucrative television deal worth three billion dollars. And member schools went to work on catching up with the Oregon Ducks. Washington State renovated Martin Stadium and built a new football facility, a $130 million project. They hired Mike Leach. a big-name coach who’d gone 84-43 at Texas Tech, another out-of-the-way school in a desolate place.
The Cougs weren’t alone. USC overhauled Heritage Hall. Arizona upgraded. Washington remodeled Husky Stadium.
And the league’s member schools hired new coaches, among them Jim Mora, Todd Graham, Chris Petersen, and Rich Rodriguez.
This is a tougher, meaner, more well-equipped conference than Mike Bellotti and Phil Knight ever dreamed of back in 1996, when they set out to build an indoor practice facility after the Ducks lost to Colorado and Rick Neuheisel in the Cotton Bowl.
Chip Kelly is gone, and he isn’t coming back. Oregon can’t dominate this PAC-12. They won’t. Hopes were high this year with Marcus Mariota returning for his junior season, but with four of his top linemen injured, they can’t protect him. He’s been sacked 12 times in two games, and already he’s banged-up again, playing at less than 100% last night.
Mariota carried the ball 9 times last night for a net 1 yard. He can’t run, a replay of last year.
The defense is porous. They missed 32 tackles last night. The Wildcats racked up 495 yards, 9-17 on third downs. The signature play of the night was Terris Jones-Grigsby driving through three tacklers for a clinching first down at the end of the game. In their last four games, the Ducks have given up 460, 439, 499 and 495 yards, and they haven’t had a 100-yard rusher all season.
In the summer the talk was that Oregon had gotten stronger, bigger and more physical, that Don Pellum would bring discipline, swagger and aggressiveness to the defense. It didn’t work.
In their next game the Ducks travel to Pasadena to face undefeated, 8th-ranked UCLA in Rose Bowl Stadium. Mora’s Bruins have a potent offense quarterbacked by senior Brett Hundley and a solid running game. Paul Perkins has broken loose for 126 and 137 yards in his last two games, and averages 5.7 yards a carry. Their defense features three former 5-star recruits on the front line and two of the conference’s best linebackers in Eric Kendricks and Miles Jack.
Still battered and bruised, the Ducks will be underdogs in that game, and they won’t be big favorites against Washington later this month or Stanford on November 1st.
When Kelly was here Oregon entered every game with a decided schematic advantage. He was brilliant and innovative. He got the players to fervently buy in to a specific and challenging philosophy. He commanded their attention and controlled their mindset.
His teams had a swagger, but it was an effective one.
They dominated a weakened conference, with USC reeling from sanctions and Stanford only just getting started in the dramatic culture change enacted by Jim Harbaugh and perfected by David Shaw. Rodriguez and Leach were just taking over. Mora came to UCLA in 2012, and so far he’s taken a team that suffered 5 straight losing seasons and had lost 12 of 13 times to the Trojans, and made them a national power after back-to-back 9-win campaigns in his first two years.
Coaching makes a bigger difference in college football than any other sport. Alabama was a 6-7 football team the year before Nick Saban became their coach. Florida won two national titles under Urban Meyer. They are 24-17 since he left.
The website College Football Matrix has a study they call Coach Effect that measures the impact a coach has on the outcome of games. The mathematics are complicated, but the essential principle is that some coaches increase their team’s chances of winning, and some coaches don’t.
The best coaches get more out of their talent and make decisions that mask their team’s weaknesses and enhance their team’s strengths. They succeed in getting their players to play smarter and harder and understand what they’re doing. They limit errors in execution, foul-ups like missed signals, wrong routes, missed tackles, assignment confusion.
Their teams are prepared and disciplined. They give consistent effort and rise to the occasion. They overcome adversity and make the most of their talent.
Oregon lost a great coach when Chip Kelly went to the NFL. It was destined to happen. They replaced him with a coach who is smart, hard-working and a good person, but nowhere near as innovative, forceful and resourceful as his predecessor. Few coaches are. Chip Kelly isn’t coming back. And Kevin Sumlin, Nick Saban and Chris Petersen are not coming to Oregon either.
The Ducks have a nice-guy coach that players like. He’ll do a capable job and earnestly prepare throughout the year. He’s sincere and a good recruiter. Going forward, Oregon is a 9-4/8-5 football team with the chance to play in a big bowl in years where the defense gels, the quarterback has experience and the team doesn’t suffer a devastating run of injuries at a key position.
This year’s team doesn’t have the depth to withstand the injuries they’ve suffered, and they don’t have the defense to go undefeated in the rest of their games.
College football is a wonderful game. I’ll always love the Ducks, and I’ll be rooting for them every weekend. But their championship run is absolutely over.