Take a second and think back to Saturday, Sept. 3, 2022.
It was 50 days ago. Not an extraordinary amount of time, but long enough that you may forget some minor details and minutiae from that 24-hour period.
Do you remember what the weather was like? What about your breakfast choice? Could you tell me any meal you had on that day or name any of the people that you spent time with that early fall Saturday?
Are you struggling to come up with answers to these questions, racking your brain and finding that you forgot a lot about what happened on that fateful day in September?
Good. Now say a prayer that the College Football Playoff committee is in the same boat.
The Oregon Ducks played a football game on Sept. 3, going up against the defending-champion Georgia Bulldogs in the Chik-fil-A Kick-off Game in Atlanta. It didn’t go well.
The final margin of defeat was 46 points. Oregon failed to score a touchdown for the first time since 2017. Quarterback Bo Nix threw two interceptions, and had Oregon fans either screaming at their television sets in agony or quietly sitting in a corner with heads in hand, wondering what decision they made in life that led them to root for a team that deployed two incredibly frustrating transfer portal QBs in consecutive seasons.
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Dan Lanning looked in over his head as a first-time head coach. The offense was abysmal, gaining 313 yards on the day. It looked like the success that Ducks fans had spent the offseason dreaming of was still at least a year away.
Boy, a lot has changed in these 50 days, hasn’t it?
The Oregon Ducks are a different team. They’re 6-1 (4-0 in the Pac-12) and hold the pole position to make it to Las Vegas for the conference championship game after dismantling the No. 10 UCLA Bruins at home on Saturday, 45-30.
The offense has scored 40-plus points in every game not played against Georgia, and the Ducks have gained over 500 yards in five of their last six games.
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Nix looks like the real deal. Since that Georgia game, he’s thrown for 17 touchdowns and just one interception, thrusting himself into the Heisman Trophy conversation. Oregon also found a dynamic running back duo with Bucky Irving and Noah Whittington, while Troy Franklin has stepped up as arguably the best wide receiver Eugene has seen in the better part of a decade.
Not once since the Georgia game have the Ducks looked in over their heads. At least not like that. They’ve largely dominated the competition. There was a game against Washington State earlier in the year that was a bit hairy for a second, but Oregon even used that as a platform to show some guile down the stretch and pull out a thrilling comeback, scoring 29 fourth-quarter points in an impressive road victory. There haven’t been that many major tests for the Ducks to pass, but every time they’re met with opposition, they seem to handle it with ease.
Like I said, this is a different Oregon team than the one that faced Georgia.
Do you think the College Football Playoff committee recognizes that? Do you think they’re willing to give the Ducks a pass for that slaughter in the first game of the season? Do you figure they will look at that 49-3 whooping at the hands of the defending champions and pass it off as an unfortunately timed non-conference game, scheduled years in advance, that landed at the feet of a rookie head coach and a team that endured endless upheaval over the offseason?
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That would be nice, wouldn’t it? If the committee thinks that way, it’s hard to argue the Ducks don’t have a legitimate chance to make it into the playoff this year. After Saturday’s win over the Bruins, Oregon will likely be ranked between No. 6 and No. 8 in the country, and still have games against Washington, Utah, and potentially USC or UCLA again in the Pac-12 Championship, should they make it there.
If the Ducks come out of that unscathed, what’s the argument against them? That they lost to the Bulldogs back on Sept. 3 as a shell of the team that they would eventually come to be?
Come on. Sept. 3 was so last year. Who even remembers what happened that day?
All kidding aside, I think Oregon put the playoff committee in a tough spot on Saturday. It wasn’t only that the Ducks beat UCLA, but the way in which they beat them.
It was vintage Oregon — Chip Kelly-vintage Oregon — ironically with Kelly coaching on the opposite sideline. The Ducks aired it out and put points on the board in bunches. When they needed to, they pounded the rock and sucked the air out of the UCLA sideline with a 15-play scoring drive that took over 7 minutes of third-quarter clock. There was a young head coach earning a new — somewhat crass — nickname for his aggressive game-management tactics, and a set of polarizing Oregon uniforms to top it all off.
If Oregon goes on to win the rest of the games on its schedule, which it is favored to do, emerging from the regular season as a one-loss Pac-12 Champion with the lone mark on their record coming in Week 1 against the defending national champions, they have a real case to get into the playoff. They will have proved time and again that they are the best team in the Pac-12, and leagues better than the squad that traveled to Atlanta months before.
Should this happen, Dan Lanning and the Ducks will likely divide the committee, making them decide how important that early season loss really was.
In Eugene, Oregon fans have spent the last 50 days doing everything they can to try and forget about what happened on Sept. 3, 2022. Wipe the slate clean, burn the clothes you were wearing, and agree to never speak of it again.
College Football Playoff committee, care to join in?
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