5 takeaways from Oregon’s nerve-racking victory over Texas Tech
You could feel it in Eugene during the days leading up to Saturday. You could feel it on the plane rides down through Phoenix, and eventually to Preston Smith International Airport in Lubbock Texas. You certainly could feel it amongst the roughly thousand or so Oregon Duck fans who set up shop in Jones AT&T Stadium on Saturday afternoon to watch their team take on the Texas Tech Red Raiders.
It was a sense of confidence, with a hint of braggadocious arrogance. The Ducks were coming off of an 81-7 blowout win over Portland State, while the Red Raiders were recovering from a 35-33 double-overtime loss to Wyoming. This should be no contest in the minds of Oregon fans; just another stop of the path towards a Pac-12 title berth and a potential spot in the College Football Playoff.
In the famous words of Lee Corso, “Not so fast, my friend.”
The Ducks got the job done against Texas Tech, winning 38-30 in a dramatic game that saw fireworks in the final sixty seconds. It wasn’t pretty, but the college football season is never a beauty contest. Rather, it often resembles an obstacle course, and the teams with the fewest scrapes and bruises at the end of the day are the ones left standing.
Oregon got nicked up a bit on Saturday night, but they will be the better for it in the end. They leave Texas with a 2-0 record, and can still have their sights set on grandiose endings to the season. None of it will be possible if they aren’t able to clean some stuff up along the way, though.
That was my major takeaway from Saturday night’s game in Lubbock. Here are some of the others:
Penalties are an Issue
Michael C. Johnson-USA TODAY Sports
The Texas Tech Red Raiders finished Saturday’s game with 456 yards of total offense. If we’re being honest, it was more like 580 yards in all, when you consider the obscene amount of penalty yardage that the Oregon Ducks simply handed to them.
While we made a lot of the Ducks’ discipline in Week 1 against the Portland State Vikings — Oregon had just 2 penalties for 20 yards — all of that came crashing down in Lubbock. The Ducks were penalized early and often, committing a total of 14 penalties for 124 yards, and it should have tanked their chances if we’re being honest.
“I think that game could look a lot different if we didn’t shoot ourselves in the foot so much with penalties on defense and offense alike,” head coach Dan Lanning said after the win.
He’s not wrong. The Ducks had 472 yards of offense, 21 first downs, zero turnovers, and an over 50% success rate on third downs. Meanwhile, the defense forced three turnovers and conjured up four sacks in the game.
That should result in an easy victory. It would, if you didn’t gift the opposing team 124 yards and six first downs on penalty.
There are reasons that it happened, of course. Lanning talked of a defensive cadence the Red Raiders used that threw off their timing on the O-line. He also stressed the need to be better in coverage at the catch point. Whatever the reasoning, it’s clear that Oregon has no business sniffing its high expectations in 2023 unless something changes.
“The best way to attack that is to recreate the exact same situation and practice and work it over and over and over,” Lanning said. “Not until you get it right, but until you can’t get it wrong. And that’s what we’ll do in the future.”
The Pass Rush is There
(Photo by John E. Moore III/Getty Images)
One of the things that I talked about all week leading up to this game was the defensive pass rush, and the desire to see what the Ducks actually had in that department. Of course, that’s something that we’ve been saying all offseason; if Oregon is going to be a contender this year, it’s going to need to start on defense with the ability to get after the quarterback.
The Ducks showed how possible that was on Saturday night against Texas Tech, making Tyler Shough’s time in the pocket strenuous from start to finish. Oregon finished the game with 4 sacks for 42 yards. According to Pro Football Focus, they had 20 QB pressures on the night, 12 QB hurries, and 3 QB hits.
DE Brandon Dorlus led the way with 5 pressures, and he deserves credit for the game-sealing INT thrown to Jeffrey Bassa after getting his hands on Shough and forcing an errant pass. Brye Boettcher was also a major factor with three pressures, and his first career sack almost causing a fumble early in the game.
From start to finish, the Ducks were getting in the backfield. Of course, Texas Tech’s offensive line deserves a bit of credit, because there were many plays where Shough was able to sit in the pocket and keep his eyes downfield. But for the first time in years, we saw a consistent and productive pass rush from the defense in green and yellow (or white and chrome, in this case.)
Camden is King
(AP Photo/Young Kwak)
I strive to walk through life with as much relaxed confidence as Oregon kicker Camden Lewis. He’s always got a smile on his face and is ready to deliver in pressure moments.
“I wasn’t even a little bit nervous,” Lewis said after the game.
On Saturday night, it was his leg that put the Ducks in the lead with a 34-yard field goal splitting the uprights as the clock drew close to a mine remaining. It was No. 49 who sent a raucous Lubbock crowd into a prolonged period of silence, and dismay.
I asked him after the game what that felt like, and if he could describe that type of feeling to someone who is not familiar with the feeling of ruining the night for 60,000 Texans.
“It’s kind of funny. Everyone was cheering really loud and I was just thinking ‘Sorry guys, this is going to hurt for you to watch. This is probably going to ruin your night, but I’m not going to miss this kick,'” Lewis said.
Lewis was a perfect 3-for-3 on Saturday night, and is now 4-for-4 in 2023, plus 9-for-9 on extra points. It’s that type of consistency in the kicking game that allows Lanning to feel confident going to his kicker in tough situations.
“We know Cam is a great kicker,” Lanning said. “Talk about composure. To have the confidence in him to say ‘Hey, we don’t want to throw it here on third down to get the first, because we know we have a guy that’s gonna be able to make this kick and put us ahead.’ For him to be able to pull that off. It’s it’s huge.”
So with the game on the line, and the decibals rising in Lubbock, was there ever a question that Lewis would pull it off again? Of course not.
“I talked to him right afterward in the locker room. He was like ‘Coach I can’t miss that. That’s a chip shot.’”
Vegas Always Knows
If you read Ducks Wire regularly, or you listen to the Sco-ing Long Podcast, then you know that it pains me to say what I’m about to say…
Vegas always knows, man.
How do they do it? I wish I knew that. The Oregon Ducks were 6.5-point favorites coming into this game, which I was on record as saying was far too low. I predicted that Oregon would win 45-21, and have no problem covering that spread. Over 90% of the wagers placed on this game were for Oregon to cover the spread, but despite that, the line continued to drop as we neared kickoff, and it finally settled at Oregon -4.5.
I guess Vegas knew what it was doing when making that line.
Fortunately, myself and other Oregon backers were let off the hook thanks to one Jeffrey Bassa and his 45-yard interception returned for a touchdown with under a minute to go, putting the Ducks up 38-30. Oregon covered, the over hit, and Las Vegas lost a lot of money.
“I was thinking go down, go down!” Lanning said of the Bassa interception. “I think there are probably some other people across the world who are really excited that he did not go down.”
Hand raised. I went against the sportsbooks and thought that they made a fraudulent betting line that was ripe for the taking. As usual, I was wrong. Why?
Because Vegas always knows.
"Just Win, Baby"
Every week after the games are played, we make a lot of certain stats, scores, performances, and outcomes from the contest. In the end, there is really only one stat that matters for the coaches and players on the field.
“Just win, baby.”
The famous words of former Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis always ring true. While Duck fans can be frustrated by the penalty yards, upset over the stagnant offense throughout the middle of the game, and proturbed by the shaky secondary, in the end it doesn’t matter a ton.
Oregon won. They are 2-0, with a handful of very winnable games coming up in the next month. The path to a spot in the Pac-12 championship game and potentially a seat at the College Football Playoff are still very much intact. That’s what matters.
Over the next week or so, the pundits — myself included — will look at the box score, the PFF grades, and the underlying metrics of this game trying to figure out where things went wrong, and what the Ducks need to do in order to improve. And then next week will roll along, and Oregon will likely blow out a porous Hawaii team, causing us all to move on and largely forget about the ugliness that this game brought about.
We may have to knock the Ducks a bit right now for their muddy play, but in the end, they achieved what they set out to do in Lubbock — leave Texas with a 2-0 record. In November, should Oregon still be in the CFP conversation, that’s the only stat that is going to matter.
