Hey Duck football fan: You know that feeling you got late Saturday evening, (maybe a little light-headed from the day’s revelry and libations), when all of a sudden you allowed yourself to think that the unthinkable might actually happen?
The win over Arizona State was so fresh, Boston College had just lost to Florida State, and you were really starting to think that the Ducks would get a shot for the national title this season.
Well come back down kid, here’s where you get to snap back to reality. The ghost of college football precedent haunts the back of your mind and you start to realize that even if the Ducks win the rest of their games this season they will still miss out on the big party down in the Big Easy.
Because national run doesn’t equal Bowl Championship Series ascendance, the equation is much more complex than that – after all, it takes six computers – and that’s why the Ducks are going to need some help to get into that game.
Because let’s just say for a moment that Ohio State loses to Illinois this weekend or at Michigan the following week. The Ducks would likely take over the No. 2 spot behind Louisiana State and it’s a big Duck party in Eugene, right? But getting to No. 2 doesn’t mean it’s a done deal even if the Ducks win out.
Take a peek in the mirror Duck fans, that’s unbeaten No. 4 Kansas on your heels. And that’s not Cornhusker red and white – you might have had a flashback to 2001 – but the crimson and cream of the Oklahoma Sooners.
The schedule just works out in those two teams’ favor, should either win out, when you take into account the valuable Big 12 championship game as a final boost over Oregon in the rankings. Kansas faces No. 6 Missouri on Nov. 23 and the winner of that top-five match up will likely face Oklahoma in the Big 12 title game, another top-five match up. The Ducks’ only hope of slipping past the eventual Big 12 champion to the BCS title game is if Missouri takes it down, as they are quite a jump down in BCS average from Oregon, or even Kansas and Oklahoma, and even two wins over top-five teams might not get them over the hump.
That is the best proof I’ve seen in years that the Pac-10 should have a title game. If the BCS is here to stay, then the conference needs to realize that, in years when USC doesn’t run the table, the other Pac-10 teams need that last game between the conference’s highest-ranked schools to truly be able to control their own destiny.
When the Trojans are making one of their runs, a Pac-10 championship game looks like an annoying speed bump, an unnecessary test of a team that has already done what it needs to do to stake its claim to a BCS national title. But when it’s anyone else in the conference making that run – especially once you get north of the Oregon-California border – a Pac-10 championship game looks like a valuable trump card to play in the BCS game’s closing hand.
The fact of the matter is, the Ducks are through the toughest part of their schedule. This has been a wild year across the country, but they have played well enough against a tough enough schedule that even in a normal season they could expect to be where they are in the rankings. Should they win out it will be a truly historic season for Oregon football.
Sadly, for a Pac-10 school in the Pacific Northwest, that might not be enough to earn the chance to play for a national championship.
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