The Oregon defense had a first quarter to forget against Tennessee last week.
Sure, the 70-minute lightning storm delay made for some unusual circumstances.
But Volunteers running back Tauren Poole was the man behind the mayhem.
Poole’s first carry of the game was for 31 yards, and Tennessee rushed for 132 yards to take a 6-3 lead after 15 minutes of play.
“I think we got caught up a little bit in the atmosphere,” senior defensive tackle Brandon Bair said. “It was just pre-game jitters.”
The Volunteers clearly read the book on the Oregon defense, lining up six offensive linemen and multiple tight ends to establish a powerful running game.
The Ducks, however, fell victim to numerous unbalanced runs, in which Poole would head away from the side of the line with the most blockers.
“They were just exploiting little miscues by us. They were playing very hard,” senior defensive tackle Zac Clark said. “They just came out in formations that we didn’t expect.”
“It was all mental stuff. We were playing our tails off. They had numbers to their advantage, and we got that fixed after the thunderstorm,” he said.
And fix it they did.
Tennessee rushed for just 50 yards after the opening quarter in the Ducks’ 48-13 win.
Conditioning played a major role.
The Oregon defense rotated bodies frequently, while the Volunteers began wearing down physically and mentally.
A healthy attitude toward run defense also helped the Ducks stop Tennessee.
The Ducks are smaller and faster than most defenses, and teams such as Stanford and Ohio State last season exploited size advantages in running the football.
“They were smart about it. They tried to fire the ball at us, but they also used mental games to get numbers to their advantage,” Clark said of the Volunteers. “It’s really just a mentality. We’ve got to go out there and beat our man individually.”
Tennessee had physically talented players that lacked experience on offense, and Oregon was able to bust open the power running game.
Down the road, the Ducks will face tougher tests from power-running teams.
The Tennessee game was, nevertheless, an important first test to pass, as well as a confidence builder.
“I love it when they come out and do that,” Bair said. “Everyone says that to beat Oregon, you have to run it right at ’em. The only team that has been successful at that is Stanford, and they had seven offensive linemen on the ball.”
Oregon was able to try different looks on defense to counter the various running plays Tennessee attempted.
“Sometimes we’re adding one person to the box,” linebacker Spencer Paysinger said. “Sometimes we’re doing D-line stunts or the linebackers are doing something. We’re not just doing one solid thing. We’re doing multiple things.”
The level of competition has been less than ideal and the sample size is small, but the Ducks have shown up well in national statistics.
Oregon is 11th in the nation in total defense (220.0 yards per game) and tied for sixth in scoring defense (6.5 points per game). Perhaps most impressively, the Ducks are tied for fourth in the nation in third-down conversion defense (17.86 percent, 5 for 28).
“That’s pretty nice,” middle linebacker Casey Matthews said when informed of that statistic. “Third down is definitely the down you want to win. But if you win first and second down, that makes third down more difficult.”
All this was made possible by a run defense that has continued to learn and grow.
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