Good Luck Ducks, Week 2: Football... Finally!

Today is a great day. All across the country, tens of thousands of young helmeted men will gather at flat stretches of land and line up to play a game known as, to few outside of the United States but especially to those in this country, football. Today also marks the end of one of the longest weeks of my college football rooting life. The fact that the last time the Oregon Ducks played was on a Thursday makes it longer in calendar years, but it is primarily the events that transpired during and after last week's game that made this past week so incredibly long. Finally, up and down the Willamette Valley, we can talk about a football game and not Boise State.

In the interest of looking forward instead of backward, I'm not going to say much about the last game. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, you can start by searching "LaGarrette Blount" (whoever that is) on YouTube . The game became one of the top stories in all of sports last week for all of the wrong reasons. I was embarrassed to be a Duck, frankly, and now I no longer have a favorite player on the current team. Hopefully this won't last long.

Purdue is up next. This will be the home opener, and I'm hoping the Autzen Stadium crowd is no less than 100% supportive. Last season's game was an overtime thriller, though both teams have new coaches and very different looks to them this time around. I've alternately heard that Purdue is a very good football team and that they were picked to finish 10th in the Big Ten.

Haloti Ngata thinks this is serious business. Ngata was a first round pick, #12, by the Baltimore Ravens in the 2006 draft. He had perhaps the best mobility to human mass ratio I have ever seen in a football player, at least at a college level.

Tonight's game is at 7:15 PDT and is being shown nationally on FSN. Locally, a portion of the game is being pre-empted by a Seattle Mariners game, but the game is being carried in its entirety on FCS Pacific. If you have Comcast, they're showing a free preview of the three FCS networks this weekend due to the programming conflict.