The mask that covered the Oregon football team finally cracked Saturday after another embarrassing loss on the road, and it exposed what truly exists underneath.
Let’s see: Saturday you are playing on the biggest stage in the biggest game of your season.
You must win in order to stay in the hunt for the Pacific-10 Conference title and to validate your season, which, as it stands right now, has no quality victories, unless you count Oklahoma – and that’s up to interpretation.
This is a must-win game if ever there was one.
But on this stage, your team is sloppy, careless, lackluster and just plain foolish. If it wasn’t a turnover, it was a missed read, a missed tackle, a blown assignment or a just-plain unthinkable penalty such as Oregon’s three personal foul penalties that helped the Trojans to three touchdowns.
And after the game Saturday the truth started to finally come out. The always-emotional Blair Phillips, the heart of the Oregon defense, seemed drained. He shed a few tears after the California game, when he realized Oregon’s season had taken an entirely new direction. He seemed utterly stunned at Washington State when he had to come to grips with the fact that Oregon let one slip away. Saturday against USC he just seemed tired – tired of going out like this in his final season with the Ducks.
And the usually politically correct Dennis Dixon expressed his displeasure at having to face the media by using a few expletives.
Not that I blame him for not wanting to discuss his third-straight poor performance on the road.
And, finally, Oregon coach Mike Bellotti said what we kinda thought all along about this team – maybe, just maybe, they’re a little too young to win big games like this.
“There’s not quite the same type of leadership on this team or the ability to bounce back and handle some adversity,” Bellotti admitted following Oregon’s 35-10 loss.
That optimism we’ve grown accustomed to even after disappointing losses to California and Washington State has quickly formed into the sobering reality that the expectations of this team may have been set much too high after a 4-0 start to the season.
This season, Oregon looks fragile on the road and maybe that won’t be fixed until next season when the Ducks tuck these brutal road experiences under their belts and come better prepared.
But another test of character awaits this team. With its preseason goals derailed, where does the team go now? Arizona and Oregon State remain, and neither appear to be the walkovers they did earlier in the season. Then again, these are two of the more winnable games on the schedule.
The first five minutes of the Arizona game Saturday likely will tell you everything you need to know about this team – do they pack it in, or do they continue to fight and build toward next season when all this season’s expectations are more likely to be met?
[email protected]