The second game of the Oregon season leaves us in a very different place than the first, and I am not sure the final score really does a particularly good job explaining why. A week ago, Oregon beat Boise State 34-27 and there were certainly problems, especially on defense, but there were also enough positive things underneath the final score to believe much of it was normal early-season football. The Ducks needed to tackle better, clean up some penalties and become more consistent, but I did not leave that game wondering whether what we thought we knew about this team might be wrong.
I cannot say that after Stillwater. Oklahoma State beat Oregon 39-31, but the Cowboys had 554 yards to Oregon’s 281, ran 83 plays to Oregon’s 59 and held the football for 36:22. Oregon had two tipped passes turn into interceptions that created 14 points, including the long Devon Jackson return for a touchdown, and without those two plays this could have become a very ugly football game long before the fourth quarter. That is not meant to discount the turnovers because Oregon made those plays and Oklahoma State did not, but they changed the scoreboard considerably more than they changed the way the game itself was being played.
The strange part is that nearly everything we had been looking at before the game pointed the other direction, especially when Oklahoma State had the football. Oregon was supposed to be able to win early downs, put Drew Mestemaker into obvious passing situations and allow what we thought might be one of the best defensive fronts in the country to dictate what happened next. Instead, Oklahoma State spent most of the afternoon playing ahead of the chains while Oregon was trying to recover from first down, and that eventually affected everything from the pass rush to field position to how many plays the defense had to withstand in the Stillwater heat.
Continuing our postgame tradition, we look back at Oregon’s loss to Oklahoma State with our Fifth Quarter analysis. There is a lot to get through here and, unlike last week, I do not think this is one where we need to spend much time trying to convince ourselves the underlying numbers looked better than the game did, because they did not.
