If my text message inbox is a decent sample, most Duck fans didn’t feel too safe with a 37-17 halftime lead in the 112th Civil War on Saturday.
I heard murmuring throughout the press box as well, as most felt that the Beavers, with Arizona’s second-half comeback against Oregon in mind, might have the Ducks right where they wanted them.
The beat writers from the Daily Barometer, Oregon State’s student newspaper, certainly felt that way, though I had to take the word of just one of them. The other, fresh off a week of the most shameless and outlandish homer-ism I’ve had the misfortune to witness, had to leave the press box at halftime because, as his colleague put it, he “couldn’t take it anymore.”
(I guess when they both showed up in orange and black to cover the game as “journalists” I should have seen that coming. Funny how not showing up in school colors and putting aside your allegiances to do your job comes easy when you are actually studying journalism.)
Oregon would do no backpedaling in the second half, though, as the Ducks had already survived that comeback two weeks earlier, and learned from it. They learned that a big halftime lead is only a job half-done, and facing the same scenario Saturday, they did what great football teams do.
They put their collective foot on the Beavers’ figurative throat and kept the pressure on until all hope was extinguished, and all that could escape from Beaver mouths were the futile lamentations of an historic season lost.
That’s why this season’s Duck team is great. Not mediocre, not good – great.
These players learn from their mistakes and take steps to correct them. That is something every great football team in history shares in common: They grow together and improve week after week. This team has done that.
That’s what the Ducks showed me in the second half: that they had learned the discipline to stay focused on the task at hand, no matter what the score was.
And the Ducks weren’t playing to keep the Beavers out of the Rose Bowl, either. They were playing to win, plain and simple. That’s another sign of a great team: not caring what the other team has at stake or what future games might be in store for you, just playing to beat the team in front of you right now and staying focused on that goal.
Sure, it felt great afterward. Knocking your rival silly on their home turf for the first time in more than a decade – while simultaneously denying them the chance to make history for their program – shouldn’t feel any other way, should it?
But that wasn’t the reward the Ducks focused on in preparation. They focused on the win as their goal, and the rest just came along with it.
“What we wanted to do was win the game. The results of what happened after that, I’m not worrying about,” head coach Mike Bellotti said.
“We weren’t trying to knock anybody out of the Rose Bowl, but there’s no way in hell we were going to come up here and try to give it to somebody,” senior center Max Unger said.
“They thought they had our number. We wanted to come up here and prove that we could beat them and prove we could beat them in their house,” junior tight end Ed Dickson said.
And Duck after Duck was adamant about the team’s motivation coming into the game to make it an Oregon win, not an Oregon State loss.
But, of course, with the former came the latter.
“It was just a little cherry on top of the icing,” sophomore linebacker Spencer Paysinger said of knocking the Beavers out of the history books, a footnote to Oregon’s offensive explosion Saturday.
Fitting that Paysinger said that, as his 70-yard touchdown after interception late in the fourth quarter was truly the cherry on top of 693 yards worth of icing.
In my book, both were as sweet as could be.
KEVIN HUDSON
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