After practice on Wednesday, Brandon Bair said something that caught my attention.
“Any team who’s got their head on straight knows that every week is your national championship,” Bair said. “You don’t win that week, everything after that or before that means nothing.”
It was a perfect summary of just how far Oregon has come as a football program and how much pressure the team faces as the year goes on.
As crazy as it sounds, it has almost become national championship or bust for this team. With every week that the Ducks remain No. 1 or No. 2 in the polls, dreams inch closer to reality. Could it really happen? Could this team actually finish at the top of the pile?
This is the new reality for Oregon. Every game is, quite literally, the most important of the year.
As anyone playing for Alabama, Ohio State or Oklahoma would point out, dreams can flicker with just one bad pass or one missed tackle. The Ducks themselves know how fickle the college football season is after experiencing close calls against Stanford, Washington State and Arizona State.
This Saturday against USC could end up being the toughest test yet for Oregon. The Trojans haven’t shown much on defense, but their offense is first-rate, and Matt Barkley might just be the best quarterback the Ducks have faced all year. In the span of three hours tomorrow, the dream of a national championship could be all but vanquished.
Those are the stakes. It will be like this for the rest of the season, unless Oregon loses. That’s an awful lot of pressure for a bunch of 19- and 20-year-olds, and it’s impossible to know exactly how they’ll react week to week.
Luckily, the results have been positive so far. Before USC resuscitated itself a few weeks ago, Stanford was considered to be the best team Oregon would face all season. At first, it looked like the pomp and circumstance of the occasion had gotten to the Ducks. They fell behind early 21-3, and looked positively disconcerted.
Then, all of a sudden, the team came to life. The final score read 52-31 and the dream remained alive and kicking.
Similar bursts of life occurred in the Arizona State, Washington State and Tennessee games. With all these comebacks, you might call this team “The Cardiac Ducks”.
But can this really keep happening? Can Oregon continue to fall behind and then come back in the second half? If Glendale is to remain on the horizon, that resilient nature will have to remain ever present.
Which, of course, brings us back to the pressure this team faces from week to week. It is almost like a bubble that just keeps expanding as time goes on. Alongside each win come more questions about the polls, more talking heads making their projections about which major bowl game the Ducks will play in.
You have to wonder — will that bubble ever burst? The team can talk all it wants about taking things week to week, and that strategy is certainly well implemented by Chip Kelly and the rest of the coaching staff.
But it is human nature to look ahead. When your team is ranked No. 1 in the nation, it is virtually impossible not to think about a national championship.
That’s the reality this team faces as it moves forward. With one loss, as Bair says, everything the Ducks have worked for could vanish. Just like that.
Kelly’s mantra is to “win the day.” At this point, the pressure is on for Oregon to “win” every day, or risk losing the season.
Just like that.
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