Friday I did a radio show from Boise. Hosts John Mallory and Rick Worthington asked about the UCLA game and the return of The Black Momba. They asked about Game Day and the 23-point spread.
Then they threw a 95-mile-per-hour, letter-high fastball.
Why hasn’t Oregon won the big one? They’ve had some success, but they just can’t break through and put it all together.
I fouled it off. I said, “First off, and Boise State fans understand this, it’s HARD to go undefeated.”
From there I rambled on about parity, the 80-man scholarship limit, and being the team the rest of the conference circles on their schedule.
Some people have a face for radio. I have a brain for writing, where I get 20 minutes to form every answer.
There are a lot of reasons why the Ducks haven’t won a national championship. The first one is that it’s hard to do so, an elusive goal in a sport where 120 teams compete and even getting there means convincing five different computer programmers you belong.
Everything has to come together in a championship season. A team has to be relatively injury-free. The kicker has to make big field goals. The defense has to come through if the offense has an off day.
The biggest thing the Ducks have lacked as a national championship contender is the high-impact disruptive defender that anchors a defense. A Nick Fairley, Dontae Hightower or Ray Lewis. Haloti Ngata might be the closest in Oregon history to that guy, the unblockable monster who wrecks what the offense wants to do.
Oregon’s is built on a different model than Alabama. The Quack Attack leads with offense. They’re going to score and dare you to keep up. The defense is designed to get key stops, force mistakes, turn the ball back the other way with big plays.
Most teams that have won a national championship have had a dominating defense lead by an impact player at linebacker, safety or defensive tackle. But those players are rare and hard to find. John “Juju” Smith a 5-star recruiting prospect visiting this weekend, might become that kind of athlete. He’s a safety, 6-1, 207, with the speed and agility to make plays all over the field once he adjusts to college ball.
The current team has five or six very good defenders, but doesn’t yet have that high-impact guy in the front seven. Nick Aliotti and assistants don’t have a Fairley, Lewis or Hightower. They’ll have to get those plays from a combination or players and scheme well, or the Ducks could come up short again. They don’t want to become the Utah Jazz or the Buffalo Bills of college football.
Could the offense keep outscoring people for an entire season? Not many teams have won championships that way. But not many offenses have the weapons Oregon has, or the organization or the discipline in execution offensively.
Maybe what I should have said was, “it isn’t the that the Ducks haven’t won a national championship. They just haven’t won one yet.“
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