TWITS: The Drive Into Duck History; The End of the Suffering (October 22, 1994)

And was there when Hawaii beat Oregon that year. Not a good memory to start the season. But what a way to finish.

A very good friend of mine knew how much i loved the Ducks and we talked about The Pick all the time. Flash forward to 2006. I had purchased us front row tix for three of us. Awesome game. Oregon one, we were high fiving cheerleaders all game and we got on the TV. As a thank you for the game, he gave me a Wheaton signed photo of The Pick that used to hang in Track Town Pizza. I love that photo!

Booyah.

Is the part that tempts the wrath of the juju.

So far it’s a great drive. So far it’s really special.

But so far, we’re not even in the Rose Bowl yet. So far we’ve won a beauty pageant.

This season’s been damn special so far – but I’m not going to rank things as better than some of the most amazing seasons ever (and the events that defined those seasons) until the season is over. If we lose the next two games that drive will be a meaningless footnote on a season filled with hope that was crushed.

Let’s get 11-0. Let’s get 12-0. Then I’ll look back and see if this drive meant something really special. Until that time, we’re a play away from losing our entire season in a cascade of injuries and sadness.

There were a couple of guys a few rows in front of us screaming “JOOOOEEEEEYYYYY” at the top of their lungs the whole first half while Harrington was riding the bench.

Soon everyone would be screaming ‘Joey’.

That was a great finish.

I knew what was going to happen.

I CAN HAZ LADDER?

not sure whats up with that. In fact its not working right now.

I figured :-D … thought it was ironic? symbolic?

I was just starting to become a Duck fan during the 91-93 seasons. I’m lucky I was too young and ignorant to realize just how bad we were.

did take me on a pretty fun date to San Diego. But, that date ended really poorly, and I had to give him the silent treatment all the way home. Yes, I’m lookin’ at you Musgrave. Funny that even though my L.A. date with 1994 ended on a sour note, it wasn’t the same at all.

If we win 10 games this year, I’m happy.

I understand the point of those who felt that mediocrity was not “suffering”, in the grand scheme of things, because okay, we’re 6-5 or 5-6 again, but hell, we could be 2-9 or 1-10 like the kids up the road and wouldn’t that suck?

And anyway, this whole football thing is just a diversion, every school has its jocks, go team go, rah rah rah, keeps people entertained during the autumn. Not everybody likes to go huntin’ and fishin’.

Long as we have a reasonable chance of winning our home games, especially Homecoming, it’s almost unseemly to aspire to anything beyond that.

And besides, all these kids are at least getting a good shot at a college education. And isn’t it great to get on TV every once in a while? Really gets the brand out of there! (Remember the old U of O commercials they’d air during those rare televised games, with that pedantic “professor” saying “The University of Oregon.. Take A Closer Look!”?)

Others (by others I mean me) have the decidedly non-Marxist opinion that if you’re going to do something as nutty as investing millions of dollars on young adults throwing a prolate spheroid around an artificial surface while repeatedly colliding with one another, you might as well aspire to excel, because otherwise it’s merely an exercise in psycho-social-cultural masturbation.

For me, it was frustrating that the team that I grew up following, the school I attended, for years didn’t seem to aspire to anything beyond maintaining its station. We had a football team because.. well, because we were in the Pac-8/10, and everybody else had one. I looked longingly at the Usual Suspects, wondering what it was about USC or UW or Ohio State or Alabama that gave those schools the ability to be competitive at a high level every year, while we setttled for the role of Teams The Usual Suspects Had To Play Every Year To Pad Out Their Schedules. “But,” I’d hear, “those are football schools.” Like there was something about being a “football school” that was beneath contempt.

Yes. I was envious. And frustrated. I wanted to be a fan of a winning team. And I’d go to games, follow them whenever I could, and sometimes they’d actually win, but not much, and in conference play they’d lose more often than not.

So when Brooks showed up and immediately changed the mantra from “We can’t recruit against the USCs of the world” to “Bullshit, we’re going to try!”, I finally had reason for optimism. I just never thought it would take 16 years to shift the paradigm. But I hung on, because I could see the changes coming. Facilities were being improved. The scholarship limits were helping level the playing field. I hung on because I loved my Ducks, and kept hoping that someday things would change, without ever actually expecting much.

To me, the 1994 season changed the expectations in a way that just buying our way into a crap bowl game, solely because we were “eligible”, could never do. The Ducks /won/ the Rose Bowl bid. It wasn’t purchased. Like it or not, the ‘89 Independence Bowl was an investment, not a reward. Wow, first bowl game since 1963? Awesome!… Wait, where? Shreveport? Okay.. What’s a Tulsa? The Poulan Weed-Eater Independence Bowl?? Sorry, but, like most bowl games, nobody gave a shit about this game outside of Eugene and, presumably, Tulsa. Yes, the investment eventually paid off handily, but it was a long-term investment with a five-year payout. And we still weren’t relevant. Check the records and see how often we were listed in pre-season writers or coaches polls before 2001. I’ll wait.

Bowl games notwithstanding, the record shows that Oregon was consistently mediocre between 1985 and 1993.. and for at least half of 1994.

Maybe you don’t find mediocrity to be the equivalent of suffering. I do.. and to me, it’s worse than being consistently crappy like OSU during that period.

We were just good enough to get us all to think big, but not good enough to get over the hump. Good enough to think, at 6-1, that the Rose Bowl was just around the corner in ‘88, only to have one injury tank the entire season, at a level far beyond 2007. To watch the Tuesday papers for the release of the AP and UPI polls, in the hopes that sometimes you’d see Oregon listed under “Others receiving votes, listed alphabetically.” To have tailgate parties because, and only because, it was a good excuse to get all your buddies together and spend the afternoon drinking and eating and carousing (wait, it’s still like that, never mind).

Then, right at a point where a typical Oregon team would have folded its tent and claimed yet another moral victory.. The Drive, followed by The Pick.

No longer was a Rose Bowl bid something that, in the words of Dameron Ricketts, “wasn’t going to happen.”

I find it highly significant that we have only seen one losing season since 1994.. but had two losing seasons between 1989 and 1994, optimism be damned.

There was a paradigm shift in 1994. Define it as a logarithmic curve, that’s OK, so long as the function results in a sharp Y-axis spike right around week 3 of 1994. And if you choose to consider the period between ’89 and ’94 as post-Suffering, feel free.

But to me, all 1989’s “success” meant was that the jailers had finally stopped beating us with chains and baseball bats; we were still in the dungeon.

I’m pretty certain that Uncle Phil didn’t start pouring money into the athletic Xanadu until after the ’95 Cotton Bowl — the first step being support for what would become the Mos Center. And ’95 was post-Suffering no matter how you count it.