It’s Oregon’s first road game. It’s against a Big Ten team. It sounds a lot like last year’s beginning to football season. And for Oregon, which has shown that it can run the spread offense as well as anyone in the nation, thank you, it has to sound pretty good.
The Ducks leave the confines of Autzen Stadium for the first time all year to take on Purdue tomorrow in a matchup of teams that have played against each other only once.
You’d have to look twice to tell the two apart, however.
In his 12th season in West Lafayette, Ind., Purdue head coach Joe Tiller tied Jack Mollenkopf for most wins by a head coach in program history. Mike Bellotti can relate, as Oregon’s winningest head coach in his 14th year. In the coaches’ careers, each has coached 208 games, and Bellotti’s win total is 129 – six more than Tiller.
Tiller has led the Boilermakers to 10 bowl games in 11 years; Bellotti and the Ducks have been to 11 in 13. Don’t forget the “x-factor”: moustaches. Tiller still wears his, while Bellotti dropped his a few years back.
All kidding aside, the teams have an uncanny resemblance.
In a highly traditional Big Ten Conference that used to love nothing more than handing the ball to the running back up the middle, Purdue implemented the spread offense early in Tiller’s tenure. Like listening to a band before it signs to a record label, the Boilermakers used five wide receivers before it was cool. Oregon, of course, switched to it three years ago under offensive coordinator Gary Crowton.
And both teams come off good, but not great, 2007 seasons. Purdue’s 8-5 record came despite a 3-5 finish in the conference, including three losses in a row to end the regular season before winning its bowl game in a shootout win, scoring more than 50 points.
Wait, isn’t that how Oregon ended last year, too?
Purdue, unlike Oregon, doesn’t have week-to-week questions about its quarterback. Curtis Painter will lead Purdue and will throw the ball a lot, convention says, against the Ducks.
In any other year under Mike Bellotti, that might be a problem. The Ducks’ defensive secondary has had so many questions around it for so long that it almost looked like it forgot what an answer looked like. Enter the D Boyz – who go by Walter Thurmond III, Patrick Chung and Jairus Byrd off the football field. An all-American candidate at quarterback throwing at three all-American candidates on defense should be a battle that Oregon fans will finally be eager to watch.
You have to figure that Oregon will go into Indiana certainly with more answers about itself than it did going into Ann Arbor last season – and everyone who watches DuckVision knows how Oregon fared against Michigan.
A guarantee for the Ducks’ first road test of the season? Hardly. Even with a high-flying offense to their credit and a staunch defense at their back, the Ducks won’t find a team like Utah State when they take the field at Ross-Ade Stadium. They’ll find a team that looks very much like itself – one that wouldn’t think twice about beating its double.
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