Solar

Will Howard on the other hand absolutely was going to lose his starting job to Avery Johnson who is amazing. OSU flopped picking Howard, but pulled the rabbit out of the hat bringing in Kelly to scheme him into something that can make the offense work.

Totally agree. There are many reasons for the 3 point home advantage and referee calls are one of them.

I was thinking the same. They will at least think twice before enraging 10s of thousands of rabid fans at an away game.

The end will be way past my bedtime. My only hope is we play good enough that the second half is garbage time and I can DVR it to see how the backups did.

With so many teams there are bound to be some really good and really bad teams. I do think that the days of parity we were used to in the PAC12 are over. They live on in the Big 12, but who cares. Our new reality is weekly exposure to wildly varying quality of teams. Losses to the bottom half of the league will be unfathomable upsets, while games against the top of the league will be national games of the year. Purdue is a well known steaming pile this year.The fact they kept it as close as they did with the Beavers makes me think the Beavers aren't worse than I thought.

The trophy should just be a a beautiful fir tree carved out of a beautiful piece of wood mounted in a bronze base. Maybe the wood should a be a waterproof variant like teak for longevity. What to call it, I don't know. Something stupid but perhaps more original would be a carved woodshed model with an axe in front. Implying who killed who that year.

Attacking the edges is the one weakness of this team because our interior OL doesn't have the speed to pull and block in open space as well as prior years. Watching Cal play SDSU was an eye opener of how bad SDSU is. I'm sure the beavers defense is okay, but 49 points isn't as amazing as I thought. In the B1G I'd say Indiana has the best offense I've seen so far.

2024 would look WAY worse if you compared it to the average of the 3 no conference games only, especially compared to 2023.

I thought Stein play calling was noticeably different from previous games. It was far more pro style, much less of creatively getting people the ball in space within 2 yards of the LOS. Tez didn't have as big of a game because of it, but it was far more efficient on the whole.

With regards to Strothers, I'm always dubious of coaches being so sure about their evaluations based on practices alone. I'm a long time believer in saying that when a player goes on the game field and shows you who they really are, you need to pay attention and forget about how they practice. There are some people that will always have that extra something when it's the real game. My hunch is they reviewed the film from BSU and thought he did well, and spent practice for the week just getting the lineup solidified with him in it. Kudos to them for doing that.

(don't hate me forever) 30-27 Beavers in overtime (Sappington misses?) 1 1 330 I would love to be way off the mark, but if there was ever a time for a hot take this is it.

Fun facts: If we reschedule to play the Beavers in 2026, we will play all three OSU schools in a single season. Probably a first and not something we thought we'd ever see. Depending on the playoffs, we could spend a third of our season playing OSU (5 times out of 15 games). It would be fun to beat OSU 5 times in a single season! Haha.

I want to see OSU run for 150 yards or less. I want Gabriel comfortable in the pocket and I want some runs make it untouched to the third level. It seems like a low bar, but if we actually achieve those things we should dominate them.

This is why it's reasonable to attribute their great play to the size of the fight in the dog rather than the size of the dog in the fight. It's dangerous for us. They did pick up some decent talent in the portal.

Given MJ is one of the only effective medical treatments for brain damage I have no issues with it being associated with football.

Finalized next week!? As most speculate this will reinvent the PAC12 a G6 conference. The playoffs arrangement could care less about "Group of #" rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Those teams are who they are. We may still get beat by them on occasion (perhaps in 2 days) but it's just not P2 level ability on average.

To clarify some things, my quote of Mariota was not to say the Ducks should act like Winston, it was to point out very clearly the team had no leadership outburst of anger regarding underperformance or lack of discipline ever. Not good. People don't change until they realize it will hurt worse emotionally to stay the same. That's a high bar sometimes. When people screw up they need to feel really uncomfortable about it to really solidify their desire not to screw up that same way again. Also, sports psychology refers to the emotional and mental state or framework of the players. Not fans, not coaches. Lastly I am not extrapolating a line on a graph I'm extrapolating cause and effect of past psychology and game performance for both teams. It's speculative by nature, and n= very small (sample sizes). Your thoughts and opinions are all valid too. I really hope something clicks this weekend and we win. The strange, nervous energy vibe from Lanning for the post practice interview yesterday did not give me warm fuzzies. I've never seen him act like that before. Either Red Bull gave him serious wings or he is beside himself at practice trying to figure out how to get the players to stop taking turns screwing up or both!

I think talent wise we should win by 30+. But motivation and discipline closes the gap to near zero.

We really need to add an old school screen pass to the running back. When your OL is getting beat, it's easier to fool the DL that they getting to the QB for a sack. It would also help take the edge of the DL aggression.

I appreciate the comments that we only saw a snippet of Lanning's looker room speech, however he didn't leave himself that much room to pivot into a tirade of anger about them playing like crap. I'm extrapolating from what I see. I don't recall any Saban like outburst of righteous indignation at his players underperforming relative to what they are capable of. Did I just miss it? I think there are only two ways to have a primal response to underperforming: 1. Losing and 2. Being on the receiving end of direct personal derision in a social setting when you screwed up. I'll leave this last nugget to ponder: After the 2015 Rose Bowl win Mariota was quoted at being shocked with the yelling and screaming he was seeing on the opposite sideline especially Winston and the head coach. "Nobody on our team EVER yells at each other we always just talk things out." That approach was part of a culture that ended a few years later with a 4-8 season for a team with zero discipline left when Taggart arrived.

Has a Dan Lanning team ever gotten close to reaching their potential without a loss? I don't think so. I think Dan Lanning is an excellent motivator once adversity hits, but I don't believe he is capable of manufacturing adversity to the extent necessary to fully maximize his teams ability. After Georgia 60 point spread win, after UW 1 solid win over 10th ish ranked Utah, after UW 2 steamrolled the rest of the Pac12, after UW 3 loss destroyed Liberty. Idaho post game speech in us vs. them showed Dan Lanning's too soft in how he approaches his players to manufacturer adversity. He said Idaho played good, he didn't blame how they played, he blamed the process. How is a human exposed to all that positive energy supposed to play with that survival instinct that failure is a fate worse than death that needs to be avoided at all cost? Looking at the Beavers (who just blanked SDSU), the have been abandon by their family, become the laughing stock of the country, the fat kid sitting alone at the table at lunch. They've been playing like their survival depends on them overcoming that social stigma. And their coach is going to make sure the players believe the situation is completely the fault of the entitled rich kids Duck team. They will be out for blood, to dominate us on the field of play. Most of the starters for Oregon don't have enough historical skin in the game in this rivalry to match the intensity the Beavers will bring. Lastly the game is in Corvallis, the fans emotional support will be lacking and it will be an oppressive atmosphere. For those reasons and Ducks past performances, I submit that sports psychology extrapolates such a strong disadvantage for the Ducks vs. the Beavers that the Ducks should lose. And given the past, Oregon losing to the Beavers may be the only hope we have of getting the most excellence out our players to compete at the level needed to finish in the top 3 of the B1G necessary to make the playoffs.

From the athlete perspective it's nice to have an away game that is 30 minutes away. That is all.

It would seem increasing the size of the playoffs field was just in time for NIL. It gives the mercenary teams a few mulligans to get things straightened out, and potentially have some lower seeded teams that are playing better than anybody by the timee the playoffs start.

"Is the staff flexible enough to tweak their system to fit the talent they have? I think they're giving this team too much to think about and execute given their respective struggles. It just might be time to keep things simple add strategies once the team executes the simple things first" Recall in 2022 Lanning was looking years ahead trying to install the Georgia defense regardless of who we had on our roster, but left Dillingham to do what he thought was appropriate on offense. Dilly thought that tailoring the offense to the strengths of the players he had at the time was appropriate (very well documented). The Offense screamed ahead of our defense. In 2023 when Dilly left, Dan Lanning said yeah this offensive scheme that is highly efficient works great, and brought in Stein on the agreement he would continue the scheme. That worked great in 2023 when the Offense was mostly carryover from the previous year. Now in 2024 we have brought in all these new players and we stuff them into this scheme that works really good. Or at least it did with the previous players... We know Stein is tailoring plays to the ball handlers, but maybe struggling tailoring to the strengths/weaknesses of our O-Line? For sure he did not re-evaluate the scheme with a clean sheet to the extent Dilly did in 2022. This could be growth area for DL to really embrace the off-seasons and early seasons to retool the scheme as much as necessary to maximize the ability of the players you actually have, not the players you wish you had.

We beat a 25th ranked Boise State team that played very well, while doing everything that would typically cause you to lose. Rankings are a strange thing at this point in the season. Still a lot of projection about what they will be later in the season. If I'm projecting, then I'd say Oregon is around 10th in the country.