Thud.
That was the sound of the Oregon football team falling back to earth Saturday at Memorial Stadium against the California Golden Bears.
No more national championship aspirations and the road to a Pacific-10 Conference championship just got that much tougher.
That sobering reality was realized very early Saturday. In fact, you could sense it on the first offensive play when Dixon ran for his life and threw an errant pass that was intercepted – one of three he threw that day.
The truth is, when the Ducks walked into Berkeley they entered a minefield.
The Bears were the more prepared team, more physical team and the more talented team with favorable match-ups across the board.
And as the Oregon players and coaches slowly strolled from the field into the locker room following the 45-24 loss, the feeling was unanimous – Cal just always seemed one step ahead of the Ducks.
This time, Cal coach Jeff Tedford won the chess match against his former boss, and the result was not pretty.
To be fair to the Ducks, being out-schemed in this game had less to do with the outcome than did Oregon’s depleted, uber-young secondary that starts two redshirt freshman cornerbacks. That meant trouble against one of the most talented group of receivers and a quarterback playing with tremendous confidence.
And with the success Oregon’s offense achieved early in the season, it was easy to forget that Jaison Williams and Jonathan Stewart are only sophomores, and Dixon is a junior who has started just nine games in his career. The occasional hiccups are bound to happen.
The silver lining of such a brutally ugly loss Saturday is simply that reality has bitten the Ducks. After strolling through two easy conference victories, with fans entertaining grandiose dreams of dancing in the Rose Bowl, the Ducks’ focus now extends no further than Saturday against UCLA.
Uh-oh, Bruins.
That’s the great thing about football – a team can’t lick its wounds for long because redemption is a week away.
And you’ve really got to admire Bellotti for fostering that mentality after Saturday. He, admittedly, was out-coached and his team was out-played. But as his players made their way back into the locker room with 20-30 Cal faithful heckling them every step of the way, there was the coach, shaking the hand of every single player.
The message was simple: Brush this one off because there’s a lot of football left.
In realty, most imagined Oregon would be extremely fortunate to stand 4-1 at this point in the season, and indeed the Ducks were. A 3-2 or 2-3 record seemed not all that improbable. Saturday, vying for a 5-0 record, the Ducks just met a red-hot and much better Bears team brimming with confidence.
So as the captain of the ship, Bellotti’s approach following a game like that must be appreciated because Oregon’s remaining schedule is littered with beatable teams and there’s no time for what-ifs.
Even that looming date at USC, which at one time seemed like an inevitable loss, looks very winnable after the Trojans struggled at home with Washington.
We’ll have to see if a shot of reality was just the prescription Oregon needed.
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