Life for an Oregon Duck fan has been quite eventful over the past couple of decades.
After going for decades as a relatively irrelevant team on the national landscape, Mike Bellotti turned things around at the start of the Melinium and a rise to prominence quickly followed. The start of the 2010s brought multiple trips to the National Championship game and a pair of Rose Bowl victories, but Oregon has also seen brutal losses at the hands of Auburn and Ohio State, as well as a 4-win season that ended in no bowl game and a fired coach just years later.
In recent years, things have still been a bit rocky off of the field with a litany of coaching changes, but the on-field product has remained stellar. In 2022, Dan Lanning proved his worth early on, becoming just the fifth coach in Oregon history to notch 10 wins in a single season, and the third to do it during his first year with the team.
By all accounts, there is real confidence that the Ducks are on a trajectory that could land them in the College Football Playoff and competing for a national championship in the coming years.
This past week, ESPN published its updated Football Power Index (FPI) which measures team strength based on 20,000 simulations as explained on their website.
This year the Ducks have the following preseason FPI ratings:
FPI: 15.0
Overall Ranking: No. 13
Pac-12 Ranking: No. 2
According to those numbers, the Ducks should not only be in a great spot to compete for a spot in the Pac-12 Championship, but if things break the right way down the stretch, they could very well be in the mix for a spot in the College Football Playoff, as well.
We wanted to see how the numbers at the start of this year compared to those in the past, though. Here is Ducks Wire breaks down each final FPI dating back to 2005: