After practice on Wednesday, junior quarterback Jeremiah Masoli stood talking to reporters for more than 20 minutes, patiently answering questions and saying the right things.
Masoli is a laid-back guy by nature, with a soft voice, but there was one topic that got him thinking about things other than football: home.
The 220-pound, dual-threat athlete calls San Francisco, Calif., home, and with the No. 7 Ducks in Palo Alto playing Stanford, he’s happy his family will be able to see him play. Masoli said there will be “too many (relatives) to count” watching him play at Stanford Stadium, and he’s just excited to be close to home.
“It’s definitely nice to go back home and be around that atmosphere,” Masoli said of the Bay Area. “It’s always different when you’re back home.”
But Masoli, who is averaging 62.3 yards rushing and 161 yards a game passing, isn’t the only one who is going home. Nearly half the team calls somewhere in the state of California home, and there should be plenty of green in the stands. The atmosphere has never been known to be particularly loud at Stanford Stadium, with a couple of players comparing games there to “large high school games.”
Junior defensive tackle Brandon Bair said that it’s tough to play in there sometimes because the team feeds off the noise, but he’s sure that with the newly-painted target on their backs after taking down USC 47-20 last week, motivation will be high enough.
“It may not always be a tough environment, but it’s a tough team to go against,” Bair said.
Both teams come in as the top two rushing teams in the conference. Oregon is No. 8 in the nation in rushing while averaging 233.25 yards on the ground, and Stanford is No. 16 at 205.63 yards per game.
Leading the attack for Stanford will be running back Toby Gerhart, a 235-pound bruiser who runs very well between the tackles.
“(He) is an amazing running back,” Bair said. “I just think they have a lot of heart.”
“They are a really scrappy team,” Masoli added. “They get after it, but so do we. We’re going to look to match that intensity. We see some things we like in their defense.”
The Cardinal will feature a smash-mouth style of football, with lots of running the football and play-action passes from redshirt freshman quarterback Andrew Luck. But the Ducks look to again run the ball a lot with their zone-read system, and if the 391 yards the team rushed for last week against a highly-touted Trojans defense is any indication, it could be another big day for LaMichael James and company.
“I think sometimes you find something that works and we stuck with it,” offensive lineman Carson York said. “Hopefully this weekend we find something that works.”
Oregon wants to do that by setting the tempo early and keeping the Cardinal back on their heels while the Ducks attack. The defense will also will come at Luck in waves to pressure him. The Ducks weren’t able to pressure USC quarterback Matt Barkley much until the second half, but when they did, it threw off the entire offense.
“(The Trojans’) offensive line was good, and we just wore them down,” Bair said. “We just were working and working until they broke. The second half, they started hanging their heads and we started to get pressure on him and rattled him.”
That intensity comes from how hard the team works in practice. Head coach Chip Kelly has practices set up to be harder than the games, so he has fresh players the entire game.
He also has them believing that the key to success is looking only at the next day. The Ducks are so focused that they don’t even care that a potential Rose Bowl berth is at stake if they lose even one game the rest of the way.
“(We looked ahead) in years past and it didn’t work for us,” tight end Ed Dickson said.
“Basically, everyone has bought in to the system and we’re following it and do what we got to do: Win the day.”
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Running the ball a common theme
Daily Emerald
November 5, 2009
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