It’s tough to walk away from Oregon’s 24-17 win over the California Golden Bears with much more confidence than you had going into it. The Ducks lost their first game of the season two weeks ago against Stanford, and a well-placed bye week gave them an opportunity to correct mistakes and get back on the right track entering the second half of the slate.
On Friday night, it didn’t look like they made many improvements at all, needing a 4th quarter comeback led by QB Anthony Brown in order to escape with a victory against a now 1-5 team that is near the bottom of the Pac-12 power rankings. For the second straight game, Oregon’s defense faced a 4th and goal situation with less than 5 seconds on the clock and their inferior opponent looking for a chance to send the game into overtime.
The result was better against Cal on Friday, but it’s still not a situation that you want your top-10 ranked team to repeatedly be in.
A win is a win, and the Ducks live to fight another day, but the questions we had about this team going into the bye week have only been magnified. There were some good moments on Friday and some bad. Here are a few takeaways we had from Oregon’s close win over Cal: