Good Luck Ducks, Week 5: Hello, Stanford!

 

Fresh off a rout, the surging Ducks head to Palo Alto. 

 

I'm not an I Told You So guy, nor am I one to make bold predictions. However, I made bold predictions to anyone in my general vicinity last week that Oregon was going to destroy Colorado and they certainly did that thing. It was very satisfying. Again, my issue was never with Deion Sanders, it was with the way the media was handling the Deion Sanders experience and how it completely overshadowed other programs that were vastly more worthy of recognition.

Moving on, there is a significantly less hyped game to play this week. The Ducks fly south to take on Stanford, a team that has not always been easy on Oregon in the past decade-plus. They've had some rough seasons of late which started to numb the rivalry, and it's expected that the Ducks should have a relatively smooth sailing game this time.

The Cardinal have struggled defensively under first year head coach Troy Taylor, which should be a scary thing when considering how unstoppable certain facets of the Duck offense have been so far. That would certainly include Bucky Irving, who has looked like he's working with cheat codes this season after a stellar 2022. And that's to say nothing of Bo Nix, who has been incredibly efficient with his passes once again. Many have declared the death of the run game in football at both the professional level as well as the college level, but I don't think Dan Lanning and Oregon are hearing any of that.

Notes and other things:

• I promised an update on this whole Ducks gas station convenience store set and have posted a pack break here. It's really great to see all of these players get their own trading cards, making it one of the things about NIL that I most pleased about.
• Where Are They Headed? Stanford could have snubbed the big college football realignment of the 2020s, but they ended up going all the way to the wrong coast to join the ACC. That will be... something, I'm sure.
• Ducks Ranking This Week: 9 (AP). That is well enough to be looking down at the rest of the conference in a normal year, but there's still a couple of Pac-12 schools ahead of them and it could well be a dog fight until the end.
• Bo Nix Heisman Watch: Skyrocketing, apparently. I would call out the bias of something called Ducks Wire, but they are citing FanDuel as their source. Gambling sites are never wrong, right?
• Game time is 3:30 PDT on the Pac-12 Network. Go Ducks!