What about the lower burden brought by fallen expectations? How this moment allows fans — and maybe the players — to be loose again. I was watching the teams run out of the tunnel last weekend after the 90-minute weather delay, and I noted that the Oregon team looked “professional,” and their demeanor was serious. But the Oklahoma State players were very loose. Drew Mestemaker said something to a teammate right before they started running onto the field, and both appeared to laugh. That “looseness” allowed them to just go play ball. The burden of expectations was gone and football was fun for them that day.
I have thought about that moment several times since Saturday, probably because it was so ordinary that it did not seem important when it happened. Two players laughing before running onto a football field should not tell us anything profound about what was about to happen over the next several hours, and I am not going to pretend Oklahoma State won because somebody cracked a joke in the tunnel. Still, the contrast stayed with me because Oregon looked like a team arriving for work while Oklahoma State looked like a team arriving to play.
There is probably something dangerous about reading too much into body language, particularly through a television screen, but there was an unmistakable difference in the way the two teams seemed to carry themselves. Oregon looked focused, serious and aware of the importance of the moment, while Oklahoma State looked like a team that had already been told what everyone thought was going to happen and had decided there was very little left to worry about. Maybe that is one of the strange freedoms that comes with low expectations because nobody asks you to protect something you were never expected to possess.
There is a reason the idea of a beast of burden has survived for centuries. The image is simple enough: something strong enough to carry what has been placed upon it, continuing forward because carrying the load is what it is supposed to do. There is dignity in that, but there is also a point where the weight begins changing the way something moves. That is part of what makes the Rolling Stones metaphor so useful here because the song is not really about whether burdens exist; it is about the tension between carrying something willingly and realizing when the weight has started to define you.
Oregon entered this season carrying plenty. The Ducks were supposed to contend for a national championship, supposed to have one of the deepest rosters in the country and supposed to be a player-led team capable of absorbing coaching changes without losing much along the way. Fall camp was described in glowing terms, and by the time the season began there were very few conversations about whether Oregon would be good because the conversations had already shifted toward how good.
That is a very different kind of expectation, and there is nothing inherently wrong with it. Dan Lanning did not come to Oregon to lower the ceiling, and the players who signed with the Ducks did not come to Eugene hoping nobody would expect very much from them. Elite programs invite pressure because pressure follows success, talent and ambition, but the problem comes when expectation stops being something in front of you and becomes something strapped to your back.
There is a subtle difference between playing to win and playing as if losing would violate everything everyone already believes about you. The first can produce aggression and freedom, while the second can produce caution, tension and the strange kind of seriousness that sometimes makes a game look heavier than it should.
We see versions of this everywhere. A golfer begins protecting a lead and suddenly the swing that carried him there no longer looks natural. A musician who has played the same piece beautifully a thousand times begins thinking about the audience instead of the music, and a writer can stare at a blank page for hours because the thing he is trying to write has become important before he has even written it.
Expectation can sharpen us, but it can also make us self-conscious. That may be one of the crueler parts of ambition because we spend years chasing something and then, when we finally get close enough to touch it, we become terrified of dropping it.
Fans are not immune to any of this. By August, we had already imagined Oregon in December, talked about playoff positioning and championship ceilings and spent weeks discussing which teams might stand between the Ducks and everything they had spent years trying to build. Every practice report, roster discussion and projection added another piece to that picture until the picture became so complete that the season almost had an obligation to follow it.
Then football happened, not because football is cruel or because expectations are foolish, but because football has never shown much interest in the stories we write for it beforehand. The ball bounces, a lineman misses a block, a linebacker takes the wrong angle, a quarterback sees something half a second late and another team plays well. Somewhere along the way, the story has to be rewritten because the game itself has always had the final say.
There is disappointment in that, obviously, but there may also be something else because the burden changes when the perfect version of the season no longer exists. Oregon does not have to protect an undefeated record anymore, and fans do not have to spend every Saturday measuring the Ducks against some imaginary version of perfection or wondering whether one ugly quarter somehow disqualifies the entire season from becoming meaningful.
The expectations have not disappeared, and they probably should not. Oregon still has more talent than most teams it will play, a coaching staff that expects to compete at the highest level and players who came to Eugene because they wanted everything that comes with those expectations. What can change is the way that weight is carried, because there is a difference between carrying expectations and being buried underneath them.
That brings me back to Mestemaker laughing in the tunnel. I have no idea what he said, whether it was actually funny or whether the expression I saw had much to do with what was happening around him, but what stayed with me was how little the moment appeared to carry. For a few seconds, it looked like two kids about to run onto a football field.
That seems obvious until you remember how rarely college football allows its best teams to be that simple anymore. There are rankings, television contracts, playoff implications, NIL valuations, draft projections and thousands of people dissecting every snap within seconds of it happening, yet somewhere inside all of that there are still 22 people lining up on a field because they love playing football.
Maybe the trick is remembering that before the game begins to feel like something else entirely. The Rolling Stones gave us Beast of Burden as a title long before I needed it for a football column, but the phrase works because most burdens are not things we suddenly pick up; they accumulate. The song keeps returning to the idea of how much weight a person is willing to carry before carrying it becomes the relationship itself, and that feels strangely appropriate for a sport where expectations can gradually become indistinguishable from identity.
One expectation becomes another. One goal becomes another, success raises the standard and the raised standard eventually becomes the new minimum. What once felt exciting can slowly begin feeling compulsory, not because the goal changed but because the relationship to the goal did.
That does not mean the burden has to be thrown away. Sometimes it is enough to remember that you are allowed to put it down for a little while, and maybe that applies to Oregon now just as much as it applies to the people watching.
There will be time to analyze every formation, every protection call and every missed tackle. There will be another ranking, another opponent and another week when the stakes begin climbing again, because that is part of what makes this sport compelling. But perhaps there is also room somewhere in there to play light — not careless, not unprepared and not indifferent to the standard, just light enough to laugh in the tunnel before somebody opens the doors.
Maybe that is the point buried underneath all of it: strength is not always measured by how much weight we can carry forever. Sometimes it is knowing when to say, “I’ll never be your beast of burden.”
Epic Rolling Stones reference!!👍