After the closer-than-expected final score a week ago for Oregon, the Ducks head out on the road to face a team that also had a disappointing first week. The Oregon defense did not look like we expected at times last week, and the Oklahoma State offense looked like a shell of what Eric Morris and Drew Mestemaker had last year at North Texas.
Rudyard Kipling once wrote about meeting “Triumph and Disaster” and treating both as impostors. That might be a little dramatic for the second week of a college football season, but there is a real point that seems to fit. September has a way of making us believe we know considerably more about a football team than we actually do, and yet it also makes us think we know very little about football.
Oregon returned their entire starting defensive line, and an evben more talented defensive backfield. With a completely new roster, Oklahoma State was expected to put up a much better fight against Tulsa. In some ways, it did, but the uncharacteristic turnovers from Mestemaker and the uneven performance of the Oregon defense left both of those statements with varying levels of accuracy and inaccuracy.
This is part of the reason why so many people despise preseason polls. They create expectations before we have any evidence of whether those expectations are warranted. Oregon returned its entire starting defensive front. One of the best offensive units in college football essentially moved 200 miles north to Stillwater. Yet here we are with as many questions in Week 2 as we had in July. Maybe more.
There is a strange duality to what this week represents for Oregon because almost anything that happens Saturday can probably be explained in two different ways.
If the Ducks go into Stillwater and dominate defensively, is that proof that what happened against Boise State was simply a first-game problem that needed to be cleaned up? Maybe. Or does it tell us more about an Oklahoma State offense that is still trying to become what Morris had at North Texas? If Oregon struggles again, does that mean there is a real concern with a defense we expected to be one of the strengths of this team, or are we simply watching a unit work through some early-season issues against an offense that is better than it looked in Week 1?
The same thing applies on the other side. Oklahoma State looked nothing like the offense most of us expected to see, but Mestemaker also made some mistakes that were uncharacteristic compared with what he did a year ago. Turnovers have a way of changing what a game looks like pretty quickly, and one bad afternoon does not suddenly erase everything Morris and this group showed at North Texas.
That makes Saturday important, but probably not definitive.
We have this crazy “want” for every game to tell us something permanent because that is how college football works now. There are rankings every week, playoff projections before September is over and national conversations that turn one bad quarter into a referendum on an entire season. The reality is that football teams usually take longer than that to tell us what they actually are.
Oregon might look considerably better this week and still have questions. It might win comfortably and leave Stillwater with people talking about a defense that has fixed some of the things that showed up against Boise State, but that still would not mean we completely understand this team. Oklahoma State may be better than it looked last week. It may not be. That is part of what makes using Saturday as some kind of final evaluation difficult.
I am not sure we are really going to know what Oregon is until USC - and maybe not even then.
By then there should be enough football behind us to separate an isolated bad series from a trend, an early-season mistake from a real weakness and a promising performance from something that can actually be repeated against a team capable of punishing every mistake. Until then, we are going to continue collecting pieces of evidence without always knowing how much weight to give them.
And that is okay. September does not have to give us all of the answers. Sometimes its job is simply to start asking better questions.