Last Saturday Oregon defeated a power conference opponent by 40+ points for the 14th time in the past 15 years. While blowing out a power conference opponent is not a novel outcome for Oregon the degree to which the Ducks dismantled the Cowboys this past weekend is, and today I want to discuss it.
First off. Just look at the scoreboard. A 66 point margin of victory is the largest margin of victory for the Ducks over a power opponent in Oregon football history. The next closest was a 59 point win over the Beavers
in 2017 at the end of the Gary Andersen era in Corvallis.
But as I often do let’s look beyond just the scoreboard. Here is the raw Yard Per Play Differential from those 13 other blowouts in the past 15 years as well as the average of those 13 games.
Immediately you can see the lop-sided nature of the game against Oklahoma State doesn’t belong in this co-hort. That’s not to say the other 13 games were not dominant performances by past Duck teams. 10 of them absolutely were, but the game against the Pokes deserves it’s own category.
Luckily earlier this week I looked at Oregon’s performance in this metric against FCS opponents. Here is the Oklahoma State game put into a co-hort of the biggest beat downs against FCS teams.
Fits like a glove.
Please note that these are not all of the FCS games Oregon has played in the past 15 years, only the ones with the largest YPP differentials. Those 5 FCS teams on average lost 8.2 games during the respective seasons that Oregon played them meaning that the conclusion here isn’t: Oregon made Oklahoma State look like an FCS team.
No.
Oregon made Oklahoma State look like a bad FCS team.
The point of this article is not entirely meant to be the stormy dark cloud in the Oregon fan base while everyone else’s excitement continues to build (more on this later). The point of this article is not entirely meant to be a piece to pile on Cowboys fans after the head coaches war of words last week.
The point I’m really trying to make is that Oklahoma State is looking like they will be an equivalent to a bad FCS team this season and for the time being that is how we as Oregon fans should view that game.
Oregon has destroyed power conference opponents before, and none of them looked like Saturday. Oregon has played over matched bad FCS opponents before and that’s almost exactly what it looked like Saturday.
Obviously the AP votes disagree with me as Oregon moved up two spots this week ahead of teams that did nothing objectively worthy of falling. But that is because I don’t think AP voters and the rest of the nation realize how bad it has gotten in Stillwater, despite Mike Gundy’s best efforts to tell them.
Now just because Oklahoma State might be in some very serious trouble right now does not mean Oregon can’t be very good. In fact observant readers may have noticed a common theme across the 5 FCS games I compared the Oklahoma State game too. And that is all 5 of those Oregon teams won at least 10 games during the regular season and were legitimate National title contenders.
The premise of my article earlier this week was to attempt to glean something from games where it is difficult to do so. The game this past week, surprisingly, was another one of those games. But just because it’s difficult doesn’t mean it’s impossible. What last week’s game told me personally is that Oregon is likely a national title contender, they just haven’t had a good opportunity to really prove it to us yet.
