Several pieces of good news over the past week for Oregon Duck football. Most importantly, they will be playing Auburn in Glendale, Arizona for all the marbles on 10 Jan 2011. This is the first time that a major university from Oregon will be playing for the National Championship of college football. There have been a couple of close opportunities over the years, mostly notably in 2001 when they should have played Miami at the Rose Bowl rather than Nebraska. A couple of years later, they were cruising along, undefeated, when Dennis Dixon, Heisman front-runner, went down with a knee injury and his backup was also hurt during a previous game. Oregon State also wound up #2 in the nation in 2000 after defeating Notre Dame in the Fiesta Bowl.
Second piece of good news was that LaMichael James was named First Team, All-American. As college football’s leading rusher (overall and yards per game) along with being tops in points scored it is a well deserved accolade. He was also named as a Heisman finalist, although his chances rank close to the survival of a snowball in hot place to Cam Newton. Newton has certainly put up the numbers and probably deserves his “favorite” status. But the eligibility issues do cloud things a bit.
As mentioned previously and above, OU football has been at the cusp of greatness for the past 10 years or so, they just needed a couple of breaks to go their way. In 2001, if Nebraska had won against Colorado and won the Big 12 Championship, there wouldn’t be any controversy. But Nebraska didn’t win the game and only reached the Championship Game because they defeated a team that beat TCU, boosting their strength of schedule enough to push them past Oregon. Fortunately, the BCS did tweak the ranking structure that said a team must be their conference’s champion to play for the National Championship. There are many that have said Miami would have beaten OU also, since Miami had many first- and second-round draft picks on their team. But OU smashed Colorado by 20 points. With the Dixon issue, if he hadn’t gotten hurt who knows what might have happened. One can really only speculate at how the rest of the season would have unfolded, but with Dixon at the helm OU was cruising.
Speaking of Nebraska, man did they throw away chances in the Big 12 Championship game. Martinez certainly showed his inexperience in the way he was unable to move the team. He is only a true freshman (I think) so he has time to grow. But Nebraska does lose numbers next year on the defensive side of the ball. It will be interesting to see how Nebraska does in the Big 10 next year. I think they will be able to compete. At the very least, they should be in the same category as Ohio State and Wisconsin.
In a previous post I mentioned that my dad, who is an Oregon State Grad, was going to have hard time rooting for OU, even though the win against OSU would put them in the big game. Got a note from him last night and he said that once the game was on the tube, he just couldn’t root for OU over OSU. So obviously he is disappointed with the outcome. But he is glad that an Oregon team is getting a chance.
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