Good Luck Ducks, Week 7: Deez Nuts

 

Number Two versus Number Three! 

 

To be perfectly honest, I thought I'd have a lot more to say about Ohio State this week. As it turns out, I really don't. Don't get me wrong: this is a huge, huge, huge game. However, with the expanded playoff format, this is no longer the game that is going to cruelly end someone's season, and unless there's a severe blowout (unlikely...?), it's probably not going to heavily alter the course of either team's trajectory. It should be fun, though!

At first thought of the Ducks joining the Big Ten, games against Ohio State and Michigan particularly seemed like a step up from their usual Pac-12 regular season competition. And on the flipside, as a fan of either of those schools, you probably weren't super thrilled to welcome a team of flashy-feathered fiends in goofy uniforms two or three time zones away. But we're here now, and we've never really liked Ohio. (My apologies to the unsettling amount of people I know personally with Ohio ties.)

The Ducks are going to quack regardless of the opponent, and they're coming off of another nice performance that showed off their talents but stopped just shy of showing their true potential. I think the best opponents usually bring out the best in top teams, so I'm hopefully that Oregon can step up and prove themselves today as one of those top teams. It's not going to be a sunken season if they can't come away with a W, but I would be shocked if the effort isn't at a season high.

A buckeye is some kind of tree nut, isn't it? Ducks can eat that in their sleep.

Notes and such:

• More uniform stuff: Oregon is busting out an all-black uniform in a new style tonight. It would probably work better if it was a month or so later in the season when it would actually be dark outside for the bulk of the game.
• Do they have any history at all? Oh, yeah. The Buckeyes were 9-0 heading into their meeting in the 2021 season. Oregon upset the Buckeyes on the road, but Ohio State would go on to win the Rose Bowl while the Ducks sputtered to a 10-4 season concluding with losses in the Pac-12 championship game and the Alamo Bowl.
• Ducks ranking this week: 3 (AP). It's #2 vs. #3!
• Dillon Gabriel something-or-other: Let's come back to this next week. This game could be huge... or not.
• Game time is 4:30 PM PDT on NBC. That's right, it's that network that used to only carry Notre Dame games. Go Ducks!

Good Luck Ducks, Week 6: Get Sparty

Oregon hosts Michigan State on a Friday night, just like the college football gods intended. 

 

Tonight, it will truly feel like the Ducks are part of the B1G. Well, that's aside from the whole Friday thing. Part of expanding to eighteen schools meant that, for broadcast reasons, Friday games were going to be part of the mix for, well,  most of the schools. Oregon hosts a traditional conference school in the green and white that they've played a few times in the past that they may someday form a new rivalry with. Or not. It's tough to say.

Last week, the Ducks won comfortably on the road over an outmatched and outgunned UCLA team that is still adjusting to a new head coach. This week, they are hosting a 3-2 team that is coming off of a blowout home loss to Ohio State. The Spartans also bring in a familiar face in ex-Oregon State head coach Jonathan Smith. This might be one night that a bunch of Beavers fans could be pulling for their in-state rival, given the lingering bitterness of their prized head coach, alumnus and former QB jumping ship as the conference was imploding.

 

It should be a fun night at Autzen Stadium, with the full complement of the student body on campus and the typical shenanigans that a Friday college night brings. The Ducks have yet to play what feels like a "complete" game this season. I'm confident that Oregon will be up for showing the rest of the conference (and football watching country) what the move to the B1G is all about tonight.

The Spartans are led by a former Oregon State backup quarterback in Aidan Chiles, who has struggled with interceptions so far this season. Look for the Ducks to continue to establish some consistency on defense, while looking out to stop Chiles' ability to scramble and move on designed runs. (Look for me to enjoy the rest of the weekend without having any football games to worry about after tonight.)

Notes and such:

• I haven't said much about the uniforms this season, but they been nothing short of wonderful to look at, blending all of the latest modern flourishes with a look back to the mid-'90s uniform era, which just so happens to be when I attended. Tonight they are going for something different, as Dan Lanning's family helped design these to help "Stomp Out Cancer".
• Do they have any history at all? Oregon holds a 4-3 edge, with their last meeting coming in 2018 in the eminently forgettable Redbox Bowl, where the Ducks squeaked out a 7-6 win. Prior to that, the two schools met for home-and-home series three separate times, most recently in 2014/2015.
• Ducks ranking this week: 6 (AP). Oregon climbed up a couple of ticks this week while awaiting the arrival of the actual CFP rankings.
• Dillon Gabriel Heisman Watch: Gabriel seems to be a step or so outside of the conversation this week, but wins over Ohio State and Michigan could change that dramatically. You never know!
• Game time is 6:00 PM PDT on FOX. Go Ducks!

Good Luck Ducks, Week 5: Placeholder

 

Oregon heads to Pasadena for some #Pac12AfterDark #B1GAfterDark action. 
 
The Ducks finally are headed into their first Big Ten conference game and... oh boy... it's UCLA. Great. That's not terribly exciting. The two ex-Pac-Whatever teams are also being forced to play at 11:00 PM east coast time and somewhere the dark wizards chancellors(?) from Michigan and Ohio State and whatever that control everything in the conference are making sure they force these outsiders and lesser schools to play at weird times and on Fridays and what have you.

The sweetest revenge will be on the field, of course.

Mighty Oregon is coming in fresh off of a Beaver beatdown and a bye week, and they seem to be headed on the right track now heading into this match against the Bruins where they are heavily favored. Heck, last season's starting QB at UCLA left his school to become Oregon's second stringer. (To be fair, this seems like a savvy move as Dante Moore should have at least two more seasons of eligibility after Dillon Gabriel leaves.) Chip Kelly is out as the Bruins head coach, leaving for a supporting role at some other trash B1G program. (Ugh.)

I rarely talk about the (mostly) random Ducks football card I show off in these posts, but it's a brave new (NIL-fueled) world out there now where I can regularly show off cards of current Ducks players if I am so inclined, like I did this week. I would be much more interested in buying football cards if more of the products out there were college focused (or, especially, Ducks-focused). What are your favorite college football cards right now?

Notes and such:

• There's a couple of UCLA horror stories that give me pause. Skip Hicks. Cade McNown (kind of). This is DeShaun Foster's program now, and I'm sure they are feeling like they're on the up and up, but I don't feel like they're going to be anywhere near the top class of the Big Ten for awhile yet.
• Do they have any history at all? Well, of course. Since the Pac-10 became the Pac-12, UCLA was skipped on the schedule more frequently than most (along with USC), but there's still quite a bit of a record to go off of. UCLA holds the edge at 39-32, but Oregon has won 15 out of their last 18 meetings going back to 2000. Whenever I hear about the prestige of the LA schools, I have to choke on my laughter because they haven't really been relevant since I was young.
• Ducks ranking this week: 8 (AP). This was unintentionally not mentioned last week. They started out at 3, dropped to 7, then 9, having not yet lost a game. They discovered last week that the only way to win is not to play, moving up a spot because they practiced hard or something. Polls are still only meaningful for barflies at this point of the season.
• Dillon Gabriel Heisman Watch: Gabriel is still in the conversation, though having a scheduled off week does not help you. Maybe he should have tried harder.
• Game time is the incredibly stupid 8:00 PM PDT on FOX in Pasadena. Go Ducks!

Weekend PWE Round-Up

Good baseball cards sometimes come in small packages. 

 

Although the bulk of the stuff I receive in the mail these days is from TCDB trades, I still have a few friends of the blog who like to exchange blind letters and packages of cards. And they are still very, very fun. Here's a few fun ones, including this offering from late June by Night Owl Cards.

Night Owl tossed a couple of current Cardinals my way, including a screaming yellow Willson Contreras card and this Jordan Walker Prizm insert. We're at the point where it's difficult to see what the Cardinals will look like come next season, but I'm guessing they're going to try to reestablish themselves around a young core which will likely include Walker.

Along with the current guys came a pair of recently retired legends. Adam Wainwright is now trying to balance full-time dad duties with part-time broadcasting and singing pursuits.

Albert Pujols on a 1989 Topps design is always going to look weird.

Speaking of legends, we go back all the way to 1970 with this one. No Heritage here -- this is the real deal.

Night Owl always has a stash of minis seemingly at his disposal, and he was once again cool enough to help me out with some of these Ginter weirdos. Bill Walton will now have a new patch celebrating his life on the Blazers jerseys this coming season.

Next up is another PWE from another Dodgers fan. If you've been here before, you can probably guess that it's going to be a gcrl/cards as i see them envelope. This Matt Carpenter pink parallel comes from the online exclusive Topps Mini set, which I think they stopped making a couple of years ago. I don't think it was terribly popular (or necessary.)

Inception! That's fun. Cho spent the entire season at the High-A level, and while his bat hasn't seemed to have come around yet, he is very young still.

This is a great collection of Heritage inserts right here. Pong! Hammerin' Hank! A future HOF Cardinal!

Parallels will undoubtedly be the death of any team collector, but it was great to snag a couple more of these yellow things from the mystery envelope.

We end the gcrl envelope with a minor league autograph card. It's Adam Kennedy! A lot of players from sets like these aren't terribly recognizable years after the card has been out, but Kennedy had a nice career that included a World Series ring and ALCS MVP award with the Angels in 2002.

Our third and final envelope comes from the one and only Lost Collector. I've always been a huge fan of these framed Diamond Kings cards from the mid 00's. This Bud Smith card is numbered to just 400.

I've made some good headway this year into collecting all of the various Topps gold parallels (Cardinals) since these became an annual thing back, I want to say, 2001? The less said about this subject, the better, but at least this is one more to tick off the list.

The lone non-baseball card need in these envelopes came in the form of a Sage HIT parallel of Devon Williams, a Ducks receiver who left two years of NCAA eligibility on the table when he opted to enter the 2022 draft. As far as I can tell, he got a look from the Ravens initially but hasn't shown up anywhere prominent in a couple of years.

Thanks, as always, for these fun blind trades!

Good Luck Ducks, Week 3: Everything is Weird Now

The famed Oregon/Oregon State rivalry game... in September?! 

It's already time for the 128th edition of the Ducks/Beavers in-state rivalry bash. (No one really came up with a better name than that when the Civil War moniker was determined to be outmoded and maybe a little offensive.) Oregon meets Oregon State for the first time as a member of the Big Ten, while recent news has shown that OSU will hang onto their Pac-12 conference affiliation for a bit longer, as they've already announced plans to add four more schools beginning in 2026 and are apparently hoping to bring Cal and Stanford back to the best coast.

The Beavs have won three out of the last four meetings between the schools at Reser Stadium where this afternoon's match is scheduled. If the rivalry, such as it is these days, or the recent road results aren't enough motivation, then the Ducks can also look squarely at the way the first two games this season have gone and look at how the national media has disrespected them. All of the elements are there for a breakout performance by Dillon Gabriel and the squad.

And yet, it's still hard to know what to think of this year's Quack Attack. This is at least partially due to the nature of nonconference scheduling, where the full playbook likely hasn't been available to the offense. The Beavers are coming off of a shutout performance at San Diego State, so the much criticized Ducks O-line needs to be on high alert.

If Oregon wants to silence the deafening sounds of a recorded chainsaw over the Reser Stadium PA, it will need to be a lot more dynamic today while avoiding some of the embarrassing errors that have plagued them early in the season. I'm still cautiously optimistic about this team, but at the same time it's hard to know what to make of them.

Notes and such:

• Reser Stadium can be a bit claustrophobic these days, as it only seats around 35,000. Sometimes it's those smaller stadiums that end up sounding the loudest, but I do wonder if the recent conference music chairs and the game being moved away from it's traditional late November rivalry slot will affect the intensity at all.
• Do they have any history at all? Well, yes! It's currently the fifth most contested rivalry in FBS all-time. The only question is how long will it continue. I believe only next season's contest has been officially scheduled.
• Dillon Gabriel (?) Heisman Watch: The numbers are still there. But will the rest of the team pull through for him?
• Game time is 12:30 PM PDT on FOX in Corvallis. Go Ducks!

An Old Pack of Cards: Yo!

Pro Set used to be cool. 

 

Another old pack of cards has been liberated from the stacks of chaos on my decks. I believe I bought this pack for way too much money at an Austin area record store a number of years ago. While I must have bought at least a box's worth of Pro Set MusiCards back in the day, I never got into their Yo! MTV Raps set from around the same time. This is weird, of course, because the ratio of artists in the rap set that I was familiar with, if not actually a fan of, was much greater than that MusicCards release. Was this because of availability or something? It's hard to say at this point.

56 - M.C. Hammer - Was anyone bigger than Hammer in 1991? Of course the critics were already out in droves by this period, but he was selling a ridiculous amount of records and was simply unavoidable for a period. There was an entire generation of music listeners who probably hadn't been exposed to a hit song based around a sample (Rick James' "Super Freak") prior to M.C. Hammer biggest hit.

37 - Heavy D. and the Boyz - Heavy D (RIP) was best known to me at the time for being behind the theme song (both versions) to FOX's Black-oriented sketchy comedy "In Living Color". And don't forget The Boyz!

64 - Public Enemy - I'm listening to PE's "It Takes a Nation of Millions..." right now as I write this. It holds up! Chuck D is a great social media follow, especially if you like basketball.

15 - Digital Underground - Humpty Hump (RIP) and his crew were sort of a party-rap collective that employed Tupac as a fringe member/dancer at one point.

20 - Doctor Dre and Ed Lover - It's the guys who (mostly) hosted the Yo! MTV Raps tv show! Dre, of course, is of no relationship to that other Dr. Dre, the one who abbreviates his title.

95 - Young Black Teenagers - Have I mentioned how perfectly '90s the design of these cards is? It's wonderful. This is the only card in the pack where I can't specifically recall one of their songs.

4 - Bell Biv DeVoe - Here's what the backs of the cards look like.

82 - Tone Loc - Tone had two huge hits that were collaborations with Young MC (of "Bust a Move" fame) and would appear in various television shows and movies in the '90s and beyond.

28 - Eric B. & Rakim - Ah yes, your favorite rapper's favorite rappers. Only Public Enemy could join them in the A tier from this pack.

35 - Fab Five Freddy - My recollection of Fab Five Freddy, aside from being name-checked in a 1980 Blondie hit due to his status as an early hip hop scene pioneer, was his showing up for lengthy on-the-street interviews during late night Yo! episodes. I bet he has a ton of cool stories to tell.

Of course, it can't be a proper Pro Set pack without one of these sweepstakes card things. Let me get in my time machine and win one of these things...

Good Luck Ducks, Week 2: Boise Battle

Oregon hosts a team from Idaho for the second straight week. 

 

Well, if you liked Idaho last week, get ready for plenty more of that tonight! Might Oregon plays host to Boise State tonight, though fortunately it will be on the home turf of Autzen Green instead of the questionably blue Smurf Turf. This week's game is expected to be a much tougher go than last week, where the Ducks were favored by something like 47 points but only really managed to put the game away in the final few minutes.

About last week: that was, uh, something, right? I have to confess that I was only able to watch a portion of the first half because I had tickets to a big Timbers match, and thanks to cable tv broadcast shenanigans, the game was blacked out on the Big Ten Network making it so I was unable to record the rest of it to watch at home later. Because of this, I'm not sure it's fair of me to assess how concerned I am about the team right now. I mean, they won, right?

I think these questions are why, more and more, I'm starting to having some issues with my personal college football fandom. It's the only thing I follow where a win isn't just a win. Margin of victory matters. Impressions matter. Opinions matter. It's all very silly. Can you imagine watching a baseball game, any game... even an important one... and not being satisfied with a win, no matter what the score? Hell, even the NFL makes more sense when it comes to this. I just watched the Eagles win last night in a back-and-forth, closely fought contest where they ended up winning by less than a touchdown. Do I think, after one game, that they're destined to go all the way? Not exactly. But! They won the game, so it feels good right now. I have watched too many college football games where my team won and I felt irritated (or worse) afterwards.

Let's do a vibe check, then. How concerned am I after the ten point win against the Idaho Vandals? Honestly, on a scale of one-to-ten, I'm proabably only at a two. It might have been a three or a four if there were some more key injuries, but I'm not really worried about it at all. The Boise State game was always going to be a bit of a challenge, and I am fairly certain that Dan Lanning and many other coaches are hesitant to open up the playbook in Week 1 against an opponent from a lower division, even if the game does get tight. I'm optimistic that the Ducks will show up in better form tonight.

Notes and such:

• No blackout issues are expected this week, as the game will be nationally streamed on Peacock. They have a bunch of games scheduled later this season on major broadcast networks like FOX, so I'm hopeful this won't end up being a repeated issue. It's just annoying that for the first time in my life I actually wanted to watch the Big Ten Network, they replaced all of the programming (even the postgame show!) with a weird looping documentary about the University of Oregon.
• Do they have any history at all? Oh yeah. The Broncos have won all three meetings between the schools, including the 2009 season opener that kicked off the Chip Kelly era with a famous postgame punch. That game would be the last time any visiting opponent would win a nonconference game in Eugene. The Ducks most recently lost the 2017 Las Vegas Bowl after Willie Taggart fled the ship he sunk like the rat he is.
• Dillon Gabriel (?) Heisman Watch: By all accounts, Gabriel wasn't the problem last week and his stats would seem to back that up. Of course, some of the most ridiculous quarterback stat lines have come in desperation, so it's at least comforting that Gabriel was able to put this in the win column.
• Game time is 7:00 PM PDT on Peacock in Eugene. Go Ducks!