Good Luck Ducks, Week 3: BYU

The Quack Attack hosts BYU in the first meeting between the two teams since 2006. 

 

The Ducks are back! The Ducks are back in the Top 25 (?!) If I made the rules, there would be no Top 25 rankings for at least the first few weeks of the season (maybe even the first six?), because the whole system is based on incomplete information and heavily biased towards those that have experienced the most success / have the highest reputation (tv ratings?) at those early stages of any given season. Could it be that there are some... flaws... in the big sport of college football?

Brigham Young University's football is also ranked and has a pair of impressive wins on it's ledger in the early days of this season. This is also a program that went 5-0 against the Pac-12 conference last season. (The Pac-12 is going through a bit of a rough patch right now, in case you hadn't heard.) This shouldn't be a Georgia level opponent that Oregon is facing today, but this is a team who is gunning for an at-large bid at a top tier bowl game at the very least. The Ducks, meanwhile, were able to take all of their frustrations out on Eastern Washington last week, erasing any doubt of the outcome very early on in the game. They were even able to get a couple of backup quarterbacks some work before it was all said and done. Again, the information on this team is still very incomplete at this point, but there's a lot of hope for a good performance from the home squad at Autzen Stadium today.

Notes and other things: 

• The Ducks are slim favorites this week at the stadium where it never rains, but most of the attention right now is on the BYU Cougars after knocking off Baylor a week ago. I feel like the Big 12 and the Pac-12 are pretty much on the same level these days, which says that this team seems capable of taking down almost anyone in the west.
• BYU flat-out embarrassed Oregon in a basketball game that I attended in Portland almost ten months ago, so I am extra hyped to see some payback this afternoon. The amount of Ducks fans that came out to the Moda Center was pitiful (we're talking like a 90/10 split in favor of the team from Utah), but I'm not going to put this on the Ducks fanbase. It's hard to get anyone interested in college basketball before March these days. Still, it was really humiliating as a fan to witness up-close.
• Speaking of humiliating, the last time Oregon played the Cougars was in a 2006 bowl game blowout loss. A random YouTuber recently posted some highlights from this game and I have almost no recollection of it. I was surprised that Brent Musberger was trotted out for such a mid-tier game. Dennis Dixon was just a game away from the start of his abbreviated Heisman campaign, and yet Mike Belliotti was still tinkering with his two-quarterback system. (Brady Leaf was... not elite.)
• Game time is 12:30 PM PDT on FOX in Eugene. Go Ducks!