The articles are premium, but I want to share some of my thoughts here as well. Obviously, our members can read the full piece there, but here are some thoughts I had following the loss. I once wrote a piece the sun rising the day after the Alamo Bowl loss; I kind of see this game in a similar light - except I think there is far more of the bright side now than then.
This Oregon team is clearly one on the rise. Willie Taggart has done a tremendous job getting recruits and fans excited about football again; but there were bound to be some bumps in the road. The belief that those bumps were going to be poor second half offensive performances in wins was a bit of a pipe-dream.
Taggart signed a pretty good class in 2017 - and many of those players are having significant impact. Players like Thomas Graham, Jr., Austin Faoliu, Jordon Scott, Johnny Johnson III and Nick Pickett are all starting for this team. But it once again points to the dearth of talent on the roster prior to their arrival. Taggart had a lot of work to do; ground to make up on the recruiting trail. This team was not going to go from 4-8 to 11-1 no matter how good they looked in the first half of the first three games.
What I did really like was the resilience I saw Saturday night. I am convinced thta had last season's team faced the 31-14 deficit with a tidal wave of momentum heading toward Sparky, that they would have folded. This team did not. That is a good sign.
FINAL THOUGHTS
It seems easy to react to this game as proof of one thing or another. It was simply a game. Were the Duck coaches outcoached? Not really.
Like all games and all teams, there were some mistakes by the coaches. One of the keys to failure a season ago was a lack of discipline, evidenced mostly by penalties. After what seemed like progress a week ago, the Ducks were once again heavily penalized, with some of the penalties being of the ‘stupid’ variety. The Duck offense stalled itself with too many self-inflicted wounds putting themselves into the kind of hole which is a difficult task – and one in which the prior iteration of Oregon football would have fallen.
That was the ‘good’ part of coaching. There were plenty of mistakes, but this staff is still working to learn how to work together in real game scenarios. There were some tremendous adjustments by the offensive staff after the slow start and the defense continued to show signs of progress under Jim Leavitt.
Sometimes people let expectations get ahead of reality. There were ten or eleven ‘winnable’ games on the schedule, but that does not mean a team will – or should – win ten games. This Oregon team does not yet have the horses to play dominating football and bully their way to ten wins; they are going to have to re-learn how to win and become elite; that takes time.
It tends to go that the extremes of winning and losing also bring out the extremes in our reactions. My thoughts break down to this: On the field, a team is never as bad as their worst moment and never as good as their best. They are somewhere in between and in constant change. Each game is its own dynamic and sometimes the learning curve of a dozen freshmen along with an entire new culture fall prey to unknown variables.
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