EL PASO, Texas — The loss will undoubtedly sting a bit.
In a game where two teams are so evenly matched, as Minnesota and Oregon were, the Ducks can’t help but feel hurt. They can’t help but wonder: What if the wind was just a little bit stronger, or that hand or forearm — as they claim — had gotten a bigger piece of the ball?
It will hurt because of a field goal, a play that 90 percent of the time reflects little in the final score. Even on the statistical sheet from the Sun Bowl, it resides as a blip, a smudge, an afterthought.
Except, well, it wasn’t.
It appeared throughout the game that the team that controlled the ball last would be the one to ultimately take the win. That was the case. Rhys Lloyd’s field goal was the dagger through Oregon’s heart. It came at just the right time for Minnesota and seared through the momentum the Ducks were so hoping to keep in the fourth quarter.
That dagger will be deep and will become a reminder of an 8-5 season that almost went awry.
The dagger that went through the Ducks on Wednesday was a dull version of one that was ever so sharp in consecutive losses to Washington State, Utah and Arizona State. And it was the one that briefly made an appearance in Seattle before three impressive wins pulled the Ducks back from the dead.
The Ducks grabbed that dagger against those final three teams, but it was sharpened in El Paso as Laurence Maroney, Thomas Tapeh and Marion Barber III showed that no matter how good the Ducks’ defensive pass rush was, it wasn’t going to make a difference.
“We did not play as well at the line of scrimmage as we needed to,” Oregon head coach Mike Bellotti said.
Oregon could defend against the Pacific-10 Conference, a set of 10 teams that tends to use more of an aerial attack. The running game on the West Coast is an afterthought.
Granted, the Ducks did stop the big Michigan machine and Chris Perry, but that was more of a case of the Wolverines being stubborn. Michigan proved in the fourth quarter of that game it could exploit Oregon’s defense.
If the Wolverines had only started earlier …
Against the Minnesota trio, the Ducks found out the Big Ten Conference is full of smash-mouth, incredibly deep offensive teams. When Barber III proved to be gaining little ground early on, the Golden Gophers went to Maroney, who had 131 yards rushing.
When they needed that 1-yard burst, they went to Tapeh. He scored three touchdowns in the game, two of which came from the 1-yard line.
Maroney was pivotal on two scoring drives. When Minnesota ran a drive of more than seven minutes in the second quarter, he was the catalyst, using 3 and 5-yard runs to break down the Oregon defense.
In the fourth quarter, he provided those same runs again, but at that point, they were far more important. Had he not gained 5 yards on the play prior to the final field goal, Lloyd would have been looking at a 47-yarder.
Who knows what five more yards would have meant. Maybe Junior Siavii’s forearm would have gotten the ball just enough to give the Ducks the last-second victory. Maybe Keith Lewis’ hand would have kept the ball from clearing that crossbar by no more than a few feet.
There were enough maybes from the game to last a lifetime and there’s no doubt the Oregon coaches and players will think about them at times until the Ducks take on Indiana in the 2004 season opener on Sept. 11. For the time being, though, they can take solace in the fact that Minnesota, a team many expected to do far better things this season, needed the final seconds of the game in El Paso to subdue the Ducks.
So close.