This season was undoubtedly a historic one for Oregon football.
Its 10-win total has been matched just three other times in the program’s 113-year history.
Running backs Jeremiah Johnson (1,201 yards) and LeGarrette Blount (1,002 yards) are just the second 1,000-yard backfield combo in the program’s history.
Mike Bellotti, who has overseen all four of the aforementioned 10-win seasons, announced his succession plan for the future of Oregon football, marking the beginning of the end of the Bellotti era, obviously the most successful stretch in program history.
The list of individual post-season accolades is impressive and seems to grow by the day.
For all these reasons and literally dozens more, this season has left its mark on the program and the record books and will be remembered for decades to come.
But the most important thing that the Oregon football program accomplished this season and the thing that will stand out in my memory is the character (“grit” in coach-speak) it showed in rebounding from its defeats and, in the display, the stigmas it expelled for future teams.
Like it or not, Oregon had earned its reputation for fading down the stretch. The reasons for these late-season swoons has varied from season to season, but the decline seemed inevitable.
I won’t point fingers here. My intent isn’t to accuse, but to applaud this team for turning that trend around. Because in life you are measured not only by your success but how you react to defeat.
By that measuring stick, this team was an unrivaled success.
This team saw as much adversity as any team in recent memory in terms of injuries to key players. Need I remind anyone that quarterback Jeremiah Masoli was at the bottom of the depth chart at the close of fall camp?
This team didn’t blink and didn’t panic when injuries depleted its ranks. It dug in a little deeper, went to work and won football games.
Another stigma related to this is that the Ducks are all flash and no substance. “As soon as the Ducks climb up the rankings they’ll stall from a loss, break camp and pack it in ’til next year,”
naysayers declare.
Again, this team has done a great service to the program by dispelling these negative perceptions.
After notching their third loss of the season, the monsoon game at Cal, the Ducks were out of the rankings, gone from all but regional sports pages and left for dead in the race for the conference title.
At that point, the cynics all had a script written for the rest of the season. The Ducks would win a couple but lose the rest on the way to maybe 7-6. Best-case scenarios were another Las Vegas Bowl.
Then that script got effectively flipped as the Ducks won out in dramatic fashion, starting with a last-minute drive to defeat Stanford and culminating with a gut-check come-from-behind romp over Oklahoma State in the Holiday Bowl. Each win along the way was a statement about the character of this team and its collective will to win.
That, my friends, is substance. We saw the initial signs of it in the comeback win at Purdue early on and saw it on full display as the team clung desperately to victory and hung on to beat Arizona.
Then there was the archetypical showdown with the nemesis: the humble, hard-working boys to the north in Corvallis. The ones who were all character, all heart, right? We all know how that went down, with the Ducks making a few more revisions to the record books and dismantling the Beavers’ BCS plans.
(Here’s how I characterized the win to my 11-year-old son: They beat the Beavers so bad, everybody got promoted.)
So while I’m sure many of you enjoy the uniforms and the hype and Oregon’s spot as one of the progressively “hip” programs in college football, you just had to enjoy watching the content of this team’s character develop and come to the fore this season so much more.
The heart they showed in both the victories and defeats along the way should make us all proud to be Ducks.
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Ducks prove character, dispel their critics
Daily Emerald
January 5, 2009
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