**Editor’s Note: Each week during football season, we feature an essay from the opponent’s student newspaper on why Oregon will lose. This week’s edition is from Do-Hyoung Park, a managing editor at The Stanford Daily.**
Stanford fans are getting a pretty healthy sense of déjà vu looking at this Saturday’s matchup between the Cardinal and the Ducks.
And not the good kind, either.
Stanford is 7-0 in the Pac-12 for the first time since 2011. Stanford is favored against Oregon for the first time since 2011. Stanford is back in the top three in the Pac-12 in scoring offense for the first time since — you guessed it — 2011.
Four years later, Stanford fans still have PTSD-like flashbacks of Darron Thomas threading the needle over and over and over again and LaMichael James showing Cardinal defenders the true meaning of speed in 2011, when the Ducks trashed No. 4 Stanford 53-30 on The Farm and knocked Stanford out of the national title game in a heap of duck feathers, broken spirits and crushed dreams.
But this time around, there will be no such travesty in the walls of Stanford Stadium. The déjà vu stops here.
Make no mistake — Stanford won’t be able to hold Oregon’s rejuvenated offense at bay all afternoon. Oregon will score points — and probably a fair number of points at that.
But the difference on Saturday will be that Stanford’s battle-tested, hard-hitting, high-flying offense will meet little to no resistance from an abysmal Oregon defense that ranks dead-last in the conference in scoring defense and passing defense and has somehow still looked even worse to the eye than it has on paper.
In a game whose final score will probably resemble a basketball tally more than a football one, I trust Stanford’s defense to force the occasional Oregon mistake and get the occasional stop much more than I trust Oregon’s defense to stop Stanford’s offense.
Stanford has a veteran offensive line that likes nothing more than to fling defenders into orbit to pave the way for Stanford’s Heisman candidate running back, tight ends who are open even when they’re not open and freshman Bryce Love and his 4.3 speed when he gets in space.
With that in mind, Stanford can still play old-fashioned, big-boy, run-it-up-your-throat Stanford football when it wants to, but the offense has added a few dimensions from years past — namely, the blazing speed and open-field ability of Christian McCaffrey, Love and wide receiver Michael Rector — and I wouldn’t hesitate to say that this is a more complete, talented offense than anything the team had back in the Andrew Luck days.
I’m confident that even if Oregon’s front seven can stop one element of Stanford’s game, the Cardinal will be able to keep the chains moving by adjusting, whatever it takes. Note that Stanford leads the conference in third-down conversions.
For example, if Oregon takes away the running game — Stanford’s bread and butter— Kevin Hogan still leads the Pac-12 in passing efficiency and has his best matchup of the season against Oregon’s lost secondary. He has also been a great runner for the last few weeks, even on a sprained ankle, to bail the running game out against Washington State and Colorado when things weren’t looking good.
I just don’t think there’s any winning against Stanford’s offense right now. If Washington and UCLA couldn’t stop the Cardinal, what makes people think that Oregon can?
And on the other side of the ball, while it’s true that Adams makes this offense look like the Oregon blur of old, I don’t think the Ducks’ offense has the surgical precision, the identity or the swagger that the Mariota-led units of old had. Yes, the Ducks put up a school-record 777 yards last week, but that was against Cal, who might as well not even play rush defense.
Meanwhile, Washington and Michigan State — two teams with comparable defenses to Stanford’s that the Ducks faced with Adams — held Oregon to 26 and 28.
Factor in Stanford’s ludicrous time-of-possession advantage, its conference-leading third-down defense and its top-two red zone defense, and it’ll be up to Adams to take full advantage of the few chances he’ll get. And I’m not confident that he’ll be able to do that.
I’m personally of the opinion that rumors of Oregon’s demise have been greatly exaggerated and that the Ducks are still a good team. But the 2015 Stanford Cardinal are an elite team. And at the end of the day, one of those two teams will definitely put up 40 this week. Much to De’Anthony Thomas’ chagrin, I’m doubtful that it’ll be the Quack Attack.