While the 2023 college football season is what is the most pressing matter at the moment, it’s hard to ignore the elephant in the room after the Oregon Ducks announced that they would be leaving for the Big Ten conference a year from now.
How will things change for the Ducks? We know that they will be playing on a bigger stage, and against some of the best competition in the nation, but will they need to alter anything that they do? How drastically will the gameplan have to change in order to compete in that league against the Ohio State’s and Michigan’s of the world?
Fortunately, Oregon has a couple of people both on the current roster and the coaching staff who are familiar with Big Ten play. Defensive line coach Tony Tuioti and defensive lineman Casey Rogers both came from the Nebraska Cornhuskers a year ago, so they know what it’s like to play in the Big Ten.
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“There’s a lot of great traditions in the Big Ten,” Tuioti said. “I just think the fan base there and a lot of different places are exciting to be a part of. You can go to the Horseshoe, you can go to the Big House, you can go into Memorial Stadium, you know, there’s great tradition there.”
While the environments will be more grandiose, the play style might be a bit different as well. Football on the west coast is synonymous with flash and scoring, but in the Midwest, a certain physicality is expected.
“Big Ten football, you gotta be able to play the run and you got to be able to also get after some athletic quarterbacks too as well,” Tuioti said. “One great thing about being at Oregon is we can recruit nationally, and we can go get some of those players too, and be able to run with them and be able to you know, play in the trenches and beast out.”
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For Rogers, a player who spent three years at Nebraska before coming to Oregon, it’s the atmosphere of playing in the Big Ten that will stand out the most to Duck players an fans.
“The cathedrals of college football are in the Big Ten,” Rogers said. “You’ve got a lot of the historic and traditional football teams and stadiums that I think it will be cool for Oregon to play. Just as a fan aspect, a lot of the times Big Ten stadiums are 100,000, 90,000, 85,000 people, so it’s always fun to go to a big stadium like that.”
The thought of those stadium environments and marquee matchups is fun to think about. However, a more pressing matter is the 2023 season, which starts in less than a month with Portland State coming to town on September 2.
At the moment, that’s what has the attention of Tuioti and the rest of the staff in Eugene.
“You know, we’re excited about being in the Big Ten, but we got a tough Pac-12 schedule that we got to play,” Tuioti said. “We got a Heisman Trophy returner in our conference, and we got a really good quarterback up in Washington, so we got our work cut out for us in this league before it’s all said and done.”
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