There is an obvious problem with grading a game like Friday night. If we simply reward production, Oregon gets an A everywhere, we congratulate everyone for scoring 84 points and move along to USC. That would also make this particular Audit almost useless because Portland State was never going to provide the kind of physical test that Boise State or Oklahoma State did.
So I am grading this one a little differently. The opponent matters, but execution still matters, too. Portland State being overmatched does not make Dante Moore working through a progression irrelevant. It does not make an offensive lineman using better technique irrelevant or erase the value of Drew Mehringer disguising a play that had become predictable the previous week.
On defense, holding an opponent to almost nothing still requires fitting the run correctly, tackling and taking advantage of turnover opportunities, even if I remain less convinced about the pass rush than the final statistics might suggest. The scoreboard tells us Oregon was overwhelmingly better, but the Audit is supposed to tell us whether Oregon was also better than the version of itself we watched a week earlier.
By almost every advanced measure, it was. GameOnPaper had Oregon at 0.46 EPA per play and a 66% success rate, compared with minus-0.22 EPA per play and a 32% success rate at Oklahoma State. The Ducks generated 0.56 EPA per dropback and 0.48 EPA per rush while producing successful plays at exactly the same 67% rate through the air and on the ground. Even after removing explosive plays, Oregon still generated 0.30 EPA per snap, which is important because it tells us this was not simply an 84-point performance built around a handful of huge plays.
The DSC models show the same kind of correction. Oregon's Offensive Predictability Score fell from 81 against Oklahoma State to 56 against Portland State, while the Defensive Chaos Score jumped from 31 to 79. That does not mean either problem is solved, but those are significant movements in the direction Oregon needed after Stillwater.
