Tag: Colorado Oregon

Pac-12 has three ranked team-versus-ranked team battles in loaded Week 4

Colorado-Oregon, UCLA-Utah, and Oregon State-Wazzu all involve two ranked teams. The #Pac12 will be fun this weekend.

If you saw the latest edition of the US LBM Coaches Poll, you know that the Week 4 slate in Pac-12 football will be special.

Three games in the conference this coming weekend involve two ranked teams.

No. 19 Colorado visits No. 11 Oregon.

No. 25 UCLA goes to Salt Lake City to face No. 10 Utah.

No. 15 Oregon State plays No. 24 Washington State.

It’s a special weekend of football for a conference which just went 29-5 in nonconference games in the first three weeks of the season.

The Pac-12 hasn’t reached the College Football Playoff since 2016. It needs its best teams to do well, and its middle-tier teams to do reasonably well … but not to the point that they knock the title contenders out of the playoff.

A best-case scenario for the league this weekend would be Oregon, Utah, and Oregon State winning well-played and competitive games. If the games aren’t close, the league still needs those three teams to win. They all have a better shot of competing for a playoff berth than the opponents they face in Week 4.

Catch all of Ducks Wire’s Pac-12 team previews for the 2023 season:

Arizona — Arizona State — California — Colorado — Oregon State  — Stanford — UCLA — USC — Utah — Washington — Washington State

Which Pac-12 defense should be the most concerned through Week 2?

Oregon’s defense wobbled vs Texas Tech. Colorado will soon face elite QBs. USC played weak teams. Which D is in the most trouble?

We can’t ignore what is right in front of us. USC “ain’t played nobody,” as the grammatically mangled saying goes.

We wrote after the Stanford game:

“Stanford didn’t test USC. This was not a test. This was another scrimmage, another preseason game. Backups played the whole second half. Under 20 minutes into this game, the score was 35-0 and the competitive phase of play was over.

“Miller Moss frankly could have been inserted into the game that quickly, but Lincoln Riley wanted Caleb Williams and the first-team offense to play through to the end of the first half, which was reasonable enough. Moss did start the third quarter and therefore got the whole second half. He deserved it, and it’s a testament to the quality of USC’s play that Moss was able to get a whole half of work. It shows the game was put to bed early on a Saturday night.”

We are waiting for USC’s defense to be tested. Meanwhile, Colorado and Oregon have had shaky games early in the season. We asked our Pac-12 expert panel, “Which team has the greatest cause for concern on defense: USC, Oregon, or Colorado?”

Here are the panel’s answers:

Anyone who thinks Colorado can beat Oregon needs to answer one question

Do you really think Deion can win in Autzen? Fine. Answer the question we put to @BuffaloesWire and @Ducks_Wire.

The Colorado Buffaloes have been one of the biggest stories of the young college football season, and rightly so. The Buffs have overachieved in a big way. Deion Sanders deserves all the credit for talking a big game and backing it up. No one can deny that his first few weeks of work have been extremely impressive. No one can take that away from him.

We can, however, point out that Colorado hasn’t yet faced a good team. Let’s be clear: Most people expected Colorado to be 0-2 through these first two games, and the Buffs are 2-0 instead. Colorado has been a lot better than expected. It takes nothing away from CU’s achievement to note that TCU and Nebraska look noticeably worse than expected.

TCU’s secondary was not supposed to be this bad. Nebraska’s offense could not have been worse than it was in Boulder this past weekend. No one was thinking Nebraska was going to have a great offense in 2023, but that cringe-worthy display in Folsom Field was spectacularly awful. Not just moderately bad, but a “worst of the worst” trainwreck.

This leads us to the first true test of Colorado in 2023. It won’t be against Colorado State this week, but one week later against Oregon on September 23. Buffaloes Wire and Ducks Wire will give you full coverage of that game. We want to give you insights from writers at those two sites, plus our own views of Colorado-Oregon.

For anyone who thinks Colorado has a great chance of beating Oregon (and we’re not dismissing that possibility), there is a brass-tacks question one must answer: If you were to set the point spread for Oregon-Colorado, what would it be?

Cards on the table, folks. No backing away from this one.

Let’s see what our panel said: