Editor’s Note: The Student Section begins a series of team-specific examinations meant to show how analysis can and does change over the course of the season. The Pac-12 might be out of the playoff, but the Oregon Ducks represent a primary case of how teams are very different in November compared to October… and compared to late September as well. TSS will present examples of chameleon-like teams throughout the remainder of November. – M.Z.
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When anyone — the selection committee or talking heads or you at home — engages in the practice of evaluating teams, the question always arises: What exactly constitutes a quality win?. A prime example of this is Oregon.
While the Ducks have had a down season for the recent standards, they are a completely different team with a healthy Vernon Adams, Jr. under center and have been left out of the top 25 the past few weeks. With Saturday’s win over Stanford, that will undoubtedly change.
With Adams the offense flows and has rhythm. The Ducks were a couple of plays away from winning at Michigan State with this.
Adams has tossed for over 1,600 yards and has a 16-5 touchdown-interception ratio. He is able to get the ball out of his hands quickly and fits the Oregon offense like a glove with its routes. He is also mobile enough to move around and make plays.
The main issue for the Ducks is season is that Adams has not been healthy and has missed time. The backup, who was in competition with Adams leading up to the season, is Jeff Lockie. While he has completed a higher percentage of passes, Lockie just does not fit the system as well. The offense is more stagnant and uneven, preventing the Ducks from surging the way they did against Stanford.
With Adams back in the saddle, the offense is running like a well-oiled machine. In UO’s current three-game winning streak, two wins have been on the road – at Washington and at Arizona State. In the past three games, the Oregon offense is averaging 43.7 points and 572.7 yards per game. Some of those numbers are aided by the 777 total yards the squad put up against California last week.
Adams was not quite to that level on Saturday, but was asked to toss only 12 passes, and turned that into an efficient 205 yards and two scores.
The big question is, now that Adams is back and healthy after missing a handful of games, how should any of us view Oregon? With the Ducks downing Stanford, how far do the Cardinal fall? If Oregon bounces back and pounds a similarly solid team in USC next week to take control back of their division, how is that valued?
Oregon is playing very good football right now, unlike the previous few weeks leading up to this three-game run. Does the committee value Oregon’s season as a whole, or does it look at how each team is playing when a particular game occurs? Do we view Stanford based on the past two and a half months, or how it played against this version of Oregon, a version which was nowhere to be found a month ago.
Stanford certainly has a rooting interest in how this is evaluated, as does the entire conference. This is true even without a realistic shot at the playoff, but if Utah or the Cardinal had won on Saturday, this discussion would carry that much more weight.
Of course there is the popular argument of West Coast bias as well. Oregon has been on a roll, but the voters and committee members on the East Coast simply may not stay up until 1 or 2 a.m. to watch, until the Ducks played in an earlier slot (7:40 ET) this week.
Additionally, when Oregon came to the Eastern time zone earlier this season, it lost to Michigan State. The voters saw that and concluded that Oregon is down this season, with the same view applying to USC. If voters didn’t closely watch the Ducks and Trojans over the past several weeks, they might not be attuned to how this team has evolved.
This is not to say that the committee does not keep all of these aspects in mind; it’s not an attack at its credibility. It is just an attempt to underscore how difficult it is to see how they value wins or losses for teams who get better as the season goes along, or even just have hot three-week stretches. Ultimately, the value of this Oregon question won’t affect the Pac-12 so much as Michigan State if the Spartans upset Ohio State.
Should that happen, this discussion about Oregon will have a longer shelf life than we think this week.
That’s why we always need to continue to monitor teams through a whole season, instead of allowing our final verdict to remain stuck in late October.
If every game really does matter, we have to pay attention to how teams such as Oregon go from average to something more than average in the latter third of the season.
