The Oregon Ducks have not had this magnitude of a matchup since the first week of the season when they were faced with a showdown against the defending champion Georgia Bulldogs. They learned a lot in that game, most notably how far they still had to go before contending with the best teams in the nation, and most obviously, that Dan Lanning’s former team is still really good.
They grew from that experience and have used it to better prepare for this second big-time matchup of the year.
“Our theme for this week was just ‘control what you control,'” said tight end Moliki Matavao. “That’s really what the Georgia game kind of set out for us; forget about everything else and just control what you can control. Control our effort, control our physicality, control our assignments. As long as we do that, we’ll come up big.”
It will be interesting to see if that’s enough to sway the tides in their favor.
While there are some obvious questions that everyone has going into this game — Who is the top dog in the Pac-12? Does the winner of this game have a chance to sneak into the College Football Playoff? — we want to take a strong magnifying glass to this game and see what it reveals. Here are our five most important questions for Oregon to answer against UCLA on Saturday: