When you are still this early on in the college football season, having only played a handful of games with the meat of your schedule still in front of you, it’s sometimes hard to determine which teams are actually good, and which have simply looked good against bad teams.
For the Oregon Ducks, that’s a serious conundrum at the moment. Through four weeks, Dan Lanning has shown that his team looks like a serious College Football Playoff contender, beating the likes of Portland State, Texas Tech, Hawaii, and Colorado by a margin of 216-53. The Ducks have an offense that is one of the best in the nation, and a defense that appears to be championship worthy.
So is Oregon really that good, or have they simply played bad teams?
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In reality, it’s a little bit of both. Nobody is going to try and convince you that PSU and Hawaii are world-beaters, but going to Lubbock and picking up a win over Texas Tech on the road is worth something, for sure, and holding Colorado’s top-5 ranked offense to just six points and fewer than 200 total yards is undoubtedly impressive.
What we want to look at to help us determine how good the Ducks really have been so far, though, is efficiency. To do that, we turn to ESPN’s Net Efficiency Rating — a score on a scale of 1-100 that incorporates offense, defense, and special teams efficiencies into a single schedule-adjusted measure of per-play efficiency.
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“Schedule-adjusted measure” is the important thing to note there. The numbers here take into account the level of competition that a team has played and calculate the results based on how an average Top-25 team would have faired in the same situation.
So where do the Ducks rank when you look at things through that prism? Take a look: