Oregon’s kickers had a chance to pad the green team’s score Saturday at Autzen Stadium during the Ducks’ spring game.
The Ducks promptly went 4 of 9 from 42 yards out, ending Oregon’s final workout of the spring. By missing five chances, they — Jared Siegel, Luke Bellotti and Paul Martinez — gave 14 points to the white team, otherwise known as Oregon’s defense.
In turn, they scored 12 points of their own. The offense (green) was grateful for that much. Those 12 points promptly upped their total by 28 percent.
The white team won, 124-43.
“I thought it was a basketball game for a minute,” Oregon safety Marley Tucker said. “I thought we did well tonight. We just outplayed the offense all together.”
Apparently, the Ducks found out that Autzen has never seen a game go to 100 points. As soon as the white team forced the offense to end a possession on downs — courtesy of a Brady Leaf incompletion — the white team spiked to 103 points, although the scoreboard read “03.”
At that point on, the defense never looked back. Not like it had to, anyway.

“You get points for making plays, and tackles for loss, and we did a lot of that today,” linebacker Jerry Matson said of the defense. “They didn’t get a lot of big plays. That’s the only way to score. If they don’t move the ball down the field in chunks, they don’t get a lot of points.”
The defense effectively kept the offense off-balance all afternoon. The white team combined for 6 1/2 sacks — led by Nate LiaBraaten’s 1 1/2. They broke up four passes and intercepted one.
The defense forced five fumbles, recovered two and held the offense’s rushing
attack to 103 yards on 39 attempts — an average of 2.6 yards per rush.
Capping all that off, the Oregon defense made nine tackles for loss, amounting to 39 yards.
All of those statistics factored into the final score, which is tallied by what Oregon head coach Mike Bellotti called a “creative” scoring system.
“I thought it was a dominating performance by our defense,” Bellotti said. “I thought they did a great job of really playing the possession downs. On third and fourth down, they came up with a lot of key plays. They came up with some turnovers and takeaways and not just the result of offensive miscues, but actually had some tackles and created fumbles.”
Offensive miscues? They were there and combined with a flat approach to the workout — intended or not — created a slow day on the supposed fast Autzen turf.
“We didn’t make plays when we needed to,” junior quarterback Kellen Clemens said.
An easy enough answer, and one that’s backed up when looking at the game’s play-by-play.
Not until the 16th drive of the afternoon did the Ducks cross the scoring plain. Johnny DuRocher led a drive that began at the green team’s 37-yard line and culminated with him scoring on a four-yard option keeper to the left side of the line.
DuRocher led the team’s next drive, the 17th and final one of the scrimmage, and fumbled on the second play, which linebacker Justin Andrews pounced on to put a defensive exclamation point on the game.
Before all of that, the offense had gotten into the red zone just twice, once when it started on the green team’s 31.
“It starts at the line of scrimmage,” Bellotti said. “Again, we didn’t have a lot of linemen on either side of the ball and I don’t know if the heat today got to the offensive line. We didn’t seem to have the protection ability to move people, but that’s no excuse.”
Clemens finished the game 4 of 10 for 50 yards and one interception. DuRocher, who was sacked three times, connected with tight end Dan Kause for a 46-yarder in the second quarter, the game’s biggest play. Otherwise, DuRocher was not as effective, finishing the day 8 of 14 for 68 yards.
Ryan Shaw, whom Bellotti singled out positively after the game, rushed eight times for 53 yards, not once getting caught behind the line of scrimmage.
Kause and Demetrius Williams both had three catches to lead the team, with the former leading in yardage with 78.
“Offensively, it was a very poor showing today,” Clemens said.
Indeed.