It has been nearly five full months since the Ohio State Buckeyes comprehensively beat the Oregon Ducks in the inaugural College Football Playoff National Championship Game. The Ducks have had five months to digest the result of that game and the entire season. They’ve also had five months to wonder what they could learn from it and what it portends for the future. More importantly, though, Oregon has had five months to consider if all of the criticism they took from the title game was accurate.
Two of the most common hot takes, as witnessed after them losing the 2011 BCS National Championship game to Auburn, was that the Ducks are not built properly to win a national championship. Their offense is gimmicky and their lines are too small to properly compete with the big lines they will meet in big-time bowl games. These opinions also sprouted after Oregon lost in the 2010 Rose Bowl to Ohio State. It’s short, simple and sweet. Oregon can’t win when push comes to shove because they’re just not big enough and just not strong enough.
After five months of analyzing these perspectives, I think it’s all pure hogwash.
Opinions are opinions. They feed a narrative and let journalists tell a story other than what happened in the game. When Oregon blitzed Florida State in the Rose Bowl, the immediate response was that the Ducks were finally able to match up against the other top teams. They scored on Florida State at will, which was proof that this Oregon team was a step above those previous ones that couldn’t match up with big, strong opponents.
After the loss to Ohio State later, the stances were reversed again. “We all knew all along that Florida State was never good. Oregon beating them didn’t prove anything.” All Oregon did was beat another team that couldn’t match up. But when they were up against a team with real strength on both sides of the line of scrimmage, Oregon was overrun again.
The real problem with these viewpoints of Oregon is that critics have to make huge assumptions, such as “the Pac 12 isn’t any good.” The Pac 12 consistently has teams, like Stanford and USC, that have future NFL offensive and defensive linemen. They have teams that are built the same way as the Alabamas and Ohio States of the world. Sure, those teams don’t always have the same talent levels. Who does? But the fact remains that Oregon isn’t spending all season playing undersized speed teams. They are playing the same mixture of styles and matchups that every team navigating a power conference schedule will face. They face pro-styles offenses, spread offenses and everything else in between. It’s not a monotonous season, just like Ohio State and Alabama face teams built differently throughout the year.
This brings us to the other major critique of Oregon. Their gimmick offense can’t perform when a team has enough time to prepare and know what to do. If you want the disproof to that argument, look no further than the second week of last season.
The Ducks met Michigan State, a year-end Top-5 team, and the game was a struggle. Oregon couldn’t really run the Spartans out of the stadium, but they did have a quick burst in the second half that put the game out of reach. Now, Michigan State had opened the season with FCS opponent Jacksonville State. The Spartans didn’t waste time preparing for the JSU; they knew that one of their biggest games of the season would be against Top-5 Oregon. Yet all of the time in the offseason couldn’t get Michigan State a victory over Oregon. The preparation time during the offseason is much longer than the preparation time during bowl season.
So why did Oregon lose to Auburn in 2011 and Ohio State in 2015? Maybe, just maybe, it has something to do with the fact that those two opponents were really good teams. Maybe it’s not about Oregon’s system not preparing them right for winning championships. Maybe it’s the fact that Oregon just hasn’t quite pulled it off yet. In 2011, they were a controversial “down or not down” run away from likely going into overtime against the Tigers. Against the Buckeyes, there were two early drops and what appeared to be a missed pass interference call away from the game becoming a high-scoring shootout. In 2010, they lost in the Rose Bowl by one point. It’s not like they’re getting blown out in any of these games.
Now, 2015 might not be the year for Oregon to finally get over that National Championship Game hump. USC and Stanford look to be rising inside the conference and the Ducks are in the inevitable position of having to replace their Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback, Marcus Mariota. This might be a year to rebuild and reload.
Then again, Oregon has done an excellent job of reloading without facing too much drop-off since Chip Kelly turned them into a perennial national power. I don’t know if this year will be their year. I don’t know if it will be next year. What I do know is that as long as they stay near the top of the college football elites, they will give themselves chances, which is all any team can really guarantee.
Another key element is as long as this system remains in place in Eugene and the talent level stays as high as it has been for the last five years, the Oregon Ducks can win a national championship.
