For the past several decades in the world of the Pac-10, and then the Pac-12, the Oregon Ducks have been comfortable in the fact that they knew who their biggest rivals were. You had Oregon State, you had Washington, you had Stanford, you had USC, and you even had Utah to an extent later in the lifespan of the conference.
Things are going to change in the future, though.
With Oregon’s jump to the Big Ten Conference, we are losing a lot of rivalries that became commonplace over the years. The Ducks will still play the likes of Washington, USC, and Oregon State going forward, but now they have a new pool of teams that will be on the yearly schedule, and a whole pool of potential rivalries to jump into.
This past week on the Sco-ing Long Podcast co-hosts Jonathan Stewart and Zachary Neel discussed which teams in the Big Ten would end up being the biggest rivals for the Ducks going forward.
To decide who the best candidates were, both Stewart and Neel assigned a number value to each team in the conference from 1-10 (10 being the strongest) for how fierce the upcoming rivalry would be.
Here’s what they came up with, and some of their reasoning.