It’ll be cold and clear for the 4:00 P.M. kickoff Friday, carried nationally on Fox Sports One, high of 51 descending toward a low of 39 by the fourth quarter, mostly sunny with a 0% chance of rain.
The forecast on how the teams teams will play is a lot cloudier.
Both limp into the game in miserable cadence. The Beavers started 6-1 this year but are 0-4 since, absorbing beatings from USC (31-14), Arizona State (30-17) and Washington (69-27) after playing Stanford close in Reser Stadium back in October before losing 20-12. They had the ball at Stanford 7 1st and goal on the last series of the game, threw incomplete four times as time ran out.
Fighting Duck, blase fans: rivalries used to mean more. In the past the two student bodies stole each other’s mascots, painted the O, tore down goal posts and burned turf. Now, the student section doesn’t even fill up. GA tickets are being offered to the public (Twitter.com photo).
The chainsaw has gone silent. Asked what went wrong after their worst-ever home loss against the Huskies, head coach Mike Riley said, “What didn’t? It was just a horrible deal by all of us, for sure.”
Beaver quarter Sean Mannion, once mentioned as a dark-horse Heisman Trophy candidate, has thrown for 4,089 yards and 34 touchdowns this year, but in the four losses, he’s tossed just 5 tds and 10 interceptions. Under heavy pressure the old Mannion has emerged: for the season he’s been sacked 23 times.
The Beavers don’t run the football well. They’re 123rd in the country in rushing at 72.8 yards a game. Leading rushers Terron Ward (5-7, 202) and Storm Woods average a scant 3.4 yards a carry. The Ducks stand 10th in the nation in the same category, but nearly all of their success came early in the year: the ground game has been in the shop for repairs since Marcus Mariota tweaked his knee, up on blocks in losses to Stanford and Arizona.
Oregon State’s run defense allows 5.06 yards per carry and 185 yards a game; the Ducks, 3.63 yards a carry and 158 a game. The trend is less comforting: over the last three weeks Oregon has been gashed in the running game, giving up big days to Tyler Gaffney and Ka’Deem Carey, 578 yards and 6 rushing touchdowns in the two losses.
In their string of four defeats the Beavs have suffered 13 turnovers. In the two blemishes on their record, the Ducks coughed up the ball seven times to none as they fell from #2 to #13.
Once alive for the Rose Bowl and even the national championship, these two teams come to their 117th meeting the bedraggled victims of multiple self-inflicted wounds, their detractors muttering scripts of collapse bitter and familiar. “They’ve been exposed,” the national pundits like to say. Okay. Achieving a winning record in a competitive conference isn’t the easiest thing to do year after year. Fans and talking heads who haven’t done 25,000 plyometric progressions since January ought to cut them a break.
For five years, this game has been for conference titles, Rose Bowl berths, BCS bowls. This year it’s a salvage operation, a battle for resilience, an opportunity to send off seniors with one warm memory. The Ducks can achieve their sixth straight 10-win season, which Nick Aliotti told the media has never been done in college football. Checking the record, Alabama achieves 6 this year. Miami had 8 straight seasons of double-digit wins from 1985-1992. USC had seven from 2002-2008 but a chunk of those were vacated. Nebraska has never exceeded five, Penn State no more than four in a row. The Buckeyes went 9-3 six straight times under Earle Bruce in the ’80s; Jim Tressel won in double digits from 2005-2009 before getting tattooed by an NCAA violation.
If the Ducks rally themselves and put away Oregon State for the sixth straight year, they’ll win some points in a trivia contest and complete a run of dominance over their Northwest rivals that reaches back to 2007, the last time they lost to OSU, 38-31 in Autzen.
The series has known some unlikely heroes and goats. Joey Harrington once threw 5 interceptions in a Civil War. In the ’07 loss Matt Sieverson, a little-used OSU running back from Bend, ran for 142 yards and a touchdown. In 1998 Ken Simonton ran wild. In ’87 Derek Loville and Latin Berry combined for three touchdowns as the Ducks won 44-0, finished with a winning season at 6-5 but got jobbed for the Sun Bowl and had to stay home.
In 2001 Keanon Howry saved the Ducks with a punt return in the fourth quarter.
In a rivalry game, much like a bowl game, winning often comes down to who wants it more, which team has more effort and energy left in a season that has already played out. For 19 of the Ducks this will be their last game at Autzen. Players like Taylor Hart, Wade Keliikipi, Brian Jackson, Bo Lokombo, Avery Patterson, Ricky Heimuli, Josh Huff, Everett Benyard, Daryle Hawkins and Dustin Haines have an opportunity to end their careers undefeated against OSU, and that would be an accomplishment they’d celebrate whenever they came to visit the Hatfield-Dowlin as old men.
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