One by one, as the final seconds ticked away, Oregon players and their coach shared in the jubilance, the triumph and the emotion.
Head coach Mike Bellotti hugged defensive stalwart Saul Patu and James Rose.
Senior defensive end Jason Nikolao put his right arm on Bellotti’s shoulder, smiled widely and went in for the bear hug.
Bellotti then embraced senior wide receiver Marshaun Tucker, looked proudly at the young man and kissed him on the cheek.
As Joey Harrington took a knee, and the students charged the field 10 seconds too soon, you just knew that Saturday’s 29-10 win over sixth-ranked UCLA was more than a game.
It was a statement.
A statement of courage, a statement of togetherness, a statement of dominance, but most importantly, it was a statement of awareness.
Just last week in Knoxville, Tenn., on ESPN’s “College GameDay”, analyst Lee Corso asked, “Where is Eugene?”
Well on Saturday, Corso knew exactly where Eugene was located as he was in town to film “GameDay”, and it is safely assumed that he will never forget the locale.
Because along with the emotion on the field, there was the madness in the crowd.
The game-time atmosphere certainly lived up to its hype, and helped the Ducks secure its 17th-straight home victory.
It was loud. It was crazy. It was, well, Autzen Stadium.
“Our crowd was outstanding today, and they were in the game for all four quarters of play,” said sophomore wide receiver Jason Willis, who piled up 48 yards of total offense on five plays. “More importantly was that they never let up and they helped us against a tough UCLA team.”
While the victory is huge for the simple reason that it was Oregon’s Pacific-10 opener, the fact that it was on national television and that it was against the Bruins made it even more so.
No Oregon player had ever beaten the Bruins in their careers, and for the seniors that was motivation enough.
“It’s awesome,” Patu said. “We feel like we should have gotten this win a couple years ago. We let some chances slip by us when they were No. 2 in the nation in 1998 and last year when we lost at the one-foot line. So it’s a really great feeling.”
Senior Lee Gundy, a native of Marysville, Calf., admitted that when Oregon went up 22-10 in the fourth quarter, the feeling of finally beating the Bruins started sinking in.
“We were up by 12 at one point, and I look up and I was like, ‘Wow, this is going to happen. This is really going to happen,’” Gundy said. “But I didn’t want to really believe it because there was still five minutes left. Then when we got the ball back and scored again, man, simply an unexplainable feeling.”
It was certainly a pride-filled group of seniors following the win. On one corner of the interview room was Matt Smith talking about the character of his team. To his left was Nikolao, boasting about shutting down Bruin running back DeShaun Foster and holding him only to 49 rushing yards.
But if you took a look on the other side of the room you’d see a player, all by himself, leaning against the wall with a proud smile on his face.
Meet Jeff Austin. The 6-foot-1, 265 pound senior was also very happy to have finally beaten UCLA, but more importantly, he was thrilled just to have been a part of the win. You see, the walk-on center made his first career start on Saturday because regular center Ryan Schmid moved over to guard to replace the injured Josh Jones.
Austin is a graduate of Beaverton High, where he earned all-Metro League honors for both defense and offense, and has been at Oregon for the past five years without a scholarship. He saw his first action last year against UTEP, Nevada and Washington St., and was really surprised to see himself in the starting line-up on Saturday.
“I was nervous, but it just felt so great to be in there,” Austin said. “I’ve waited five long years for something like this.”
Just as all of the Duck players, coaches, fans, etc., have endured that same long wait to celebrate a victory over UCLA.
So when the clock showed 0:00, there was indeed some celebration.
But not too much. As most Oregon players reminded people, the revelry of the UCLA win will last for “about eight hours”, and then all talk and focus will turn to next week’s “big-time” game that will again be nationally televised.
“All this week did was make next week’s game against Washington that much bigger,” Smith said. “That’s what you want.”
The Ducks also wanted to get into the national spotlight.
Well, with the win, Oregon has clearly opened some eyes. And if the Ducks keep performing with such passion and emotion, those eyes could stay glued on them all season long.