There was a moment late in the third quarter Saturday night when the scoreboard at Autzen Stadium showed Nebraska leading Oregon 14-6, and I found myself wondering whether we were watching something considerably more troubling than another difficult offensive performance. The Ducks were six games into a season that began with national championship expectations, and there was almost nothing about their offense that resembled a team capable of competing for one.
By the time Dylan Raiola found Jamari Johnson in the end zone with 28 seconds remaining, the conversation had changed. Oregon had somehow survived a game it had little business winning for most of the evening, and an exuberant Autzen crowd celebrated a 17-14 victory that might eventually prove more important than anyone understood when the clock reached zero.
But winning doesn’t erase what happened before the winning play, and sometimes the most important things we learn about a team come from the parts of a game we would rather forget.
That is especially true of this Oregon team, which continues to look like two very different programs operating under the same roof. One has developed a defensive identity that grows more convincing with each passing week. The other is an offense that appears to be searching for the things it once did almost effortlessly, hoping that the return of Dante Moore will somehow make everything right again.
The truth is probably more complicated than that, and Saturday night provided another uncomfortable opportunity to examine why.
