As the football universe — on every level from the armchair quarterback to the national media — begins to anticipate the reveal of the final College Football Playoff rankings on Dec. 3, everyone is searching for an unseen reason to elevate one team over another. It believes that what is plain to see cannot be all there is to the game. One team’s ranking over another must be quantifiable, through what has already been decided through results, but that may not tell the whole story.
This year the Oregon Ducks have been exactly what meets the eye. Since a battle with Washington in Week 7 steered them wide right of a victory that would’ve catapulted the team firmly into the national spotlight, the Ducks have been on the warpath toward a rematch with the team that usurped them. They play football that fulfills their expectations — they don’t fight to surprise themselves.
“I expected us to be here,” head coach Dan Lanning told GoDucks after defeating Oregon State on Friday. “I don’t really know what everybody else thought but I expected us to be in this position because I know what our team’s capable of.”
However, despite Lanning’s expectations, they didn’t beat the Huskies. It ended by virtue of a last-second field goal that was missed by a literal foot and a metaphorical mile, leaving the Ducks three points adrift of an undefeated record.
The prevailing narrative from that game, though, was that Oregon had beaten itself –– that the Ducks outplayed Washington on the day; that Heisman candidate Michael Penix Jr. failed in comparison to his Oregonian counterpart; and that the Ducks might just look like the better group of the two. Since then, morally, the football world says, “The Ducks can’t be ranked above the Huskies until they beat them, even if they ‘look’ better.”
It’s the same concept that has kept Texas ahead of Alabama — the Longhorns went into Tuscaloosa in Week 2 and took down the Crimson Tide. Much like the Ducks, Alabama has surged back, but it remains pinned in the eighth slot on the basis of a result that occurred 82 days ago. Both sides look better, but that’s apparently not enough to see them leapfrog their respective competitors.
That’s the eye test: an ambiguous method of measurement that leaves decisions to instinct and feel rather than records and statistics. The Ducks lost that day in Seattle, but they’ve looked better — even if neither has dropped a game since. No team has come within a score of beating Oregon, and they’ve demolished their opponents 221-89, scoring roughly 248% of their opponents’ total points. In isolation, those numbers are impressive, but it doesn’t come close to describing what’s happened on the field.
Closely tied to this is the ESPN Football Power Index, which, much like the eye test, diverges early and often from the national narrative. For Oregon’s purposes, it’s the closest thing that statistics have to the eye test. There, the Ducks find themselves ranked fifth, best amongst the Pac-12 teams, and behind two Big Ten and two SEC sides.
Since that day in Seattle, where Penix Jr. was anointed the de-facto Heisman favorite, Bo Nix has stormed toward the award, tying Oregon’s single-game passing touchdown record in the first half against Arizona State in Week 12 and making the most of his star receivers. On the College Football Playoff show on Nov. 21, ESPN pundit Anthony “Booger” McFarland said that “Oregon is a team that nobody wants to play right now.”
That comes down to the way that it beats teams — the way it looks. It’s not personal. They take care of business, are never satisfied and beat teams out of contention. Oregon has played Colorado (at the time No. 19) and Utah (at the time No. 18) in games where it beat the spread by multiple scores. Neither is now ranked.
In 2023, it’s not about what happened in Week 7. It’s not about what has happened since either, inside and out of the West Coast’s football capital. It’s just been about playing the best football that Oregon can, without an eye on anyone else. Oregon has been the most entertaining team in college football — and they’ll head to prove it in the entertainment capital of the world next week, against the team whose only remaining leg to stand on is its victory on Montlake.
It’s not Ducks vs. Huskies. It’s “Ducks vs. Them,” just like it has been each week since they’ve last met, and Oregon will hand the world its new green-and-yellow glasses. It’s not a question of whether the Ducks can play —it never has been. Friday night will be about overcoming expectations, proving the eye test true and blowing the world open with spectacle.
