Get frustrated with the gap between college football and college? Ever feel like the Ducks aren’t your Ducks, they’re just the Ducks? Ever feel like Jason Fife doesn’t love you, doesn’t even know you, doesn’t care about you?
Well, here’s your cure: Ducks 435.
Ducks 435 (yes, it’s upper division) is a class taught by Ducks for Ducks (CRN number 6-2). It’s a way to get personal with Fife. Get to know Onterrio Smith. Go to Mike Bellotti’s office hours.
The books will have “offense” and “defense” on them. The overheads will be all circles, squares and squiggly lines.
Bellotti will be the mad professor of this course, growing his mustache out to insane lengths. He will assign game tapes as homework, have students give presentations on the next week’s team and assign group work, splitting the groups out among his assistant coaches.
Fife, Smith and others will be the GTFs of this course, and they’ll rotate with each section each week. This will be time for “discussion.” You can talk about Smith’s run at the Heisman one week, ask Kevin Mitchell how he hits so hard the next week.
Steven Moore will be a GTF one week, and he’ll pose a question about the Arizona State game, and the room will fall into one of those awkward silences you can only find in discussion sections.
The midterm will be to attend the Homecoming game. The final will be sometime around Jan. 1, hopefully. The class will require outside study to the tune of four home games before school starts.
And there will be field trips. Oh, there will be field trips. You can bet these aren’t the trips to the museum of natural history you took when you were in grade school. Oh, no. These are road trips that boggle the mind, field trips that are a study in how far to push the human heart on a Saturday before it completely stops.
This class will ignore all the business aspects of college football and focus on the sensations created on glorious fall afternoons at Autzen. As students in the back of the room fall asleep and spill juice on themselves, Bellotti will spout on about the ugly beauty of football, the pleasure he gets when a helmet hits another helmet near him, the summer days that fade into crisp autumn nights, as football remains the one weekly constant.
It will be Ducks on Ducks for Ducks.
Ducks 435. Oh, but we can dream, can’t we?
In the winter it will shift to Hoops 465 (CRN number Elite Eight). Taught by Ernie Kent, this is a much more frenetic class. Kent will launch into tirades, wave his hands about and yell at kids in the back of the class.
“Bryan! Is that defense? You call that defense?”
But then, of course, Kent will make the trek to the back of the class, pat the kid on the shoulder, ask him how things are going.
Meanwhile, Luke Jackson and Luke Ridnour will answer only together and only to “The Lukes,” as the advertising campaign for this year’s squad seems to be unable to differentiate the two. Robert Johnson and Brian Helquist will field questions in discussion about what it’s like to play without Chris Christoffersen and Freddie Jones. Those will be the only questions asked.
Jordan Kent will just sit in a corner and smile the whole time.
Hoops 465 students will be forced to wear the same yellow shirt to each session. It will be a two-hour class, and at the break students will practice “making noise” — respectfully, of course.
Check the recently-released course catalog for further information.
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