After tearing through their first three games, the Ducks have made it to the conference portion of the schedule. Hopefully today's quack can help tide you over until Saturday night.
- Moseley's feature piece takes a look at secondary coach John Neal expanding the rotation for the defensive backfield. Neal is taking a page from the deep rotation used for the defensive line and he wants all of the players to consider themselves starters. And, after the injuries suffered last year, having a slew of talented players with significant playing time is probably a good idea.
- John Hunt blogs about the Ducks turning up the heat during practice in order to prepare to travel to Tempe this weekend, where game-time temperature could reach 103 degrees.
- Dennis Erickson has some thoughts on why Oregon may be the best team in the country. In the same article, Arizona Republic reporter Doug Haller also notes that the Sun Devils have had problems filling their stadum: "Through two home games, ASU hasn't had much of a home-field advantage, playing in front of crowds that fill a little more than half the 73,379-capacity stadium." Maybe the start of conference play and a close loss to Wisconsin will help.
- Jesse Sowa has a piece for the Albany Democrat-Herald on Darron Thomas' successful first three games as the starting quarterback.
- And it looks like the men's basketball roster will be down to just eight scholarship players as Bob Clark reports on the likelihood that senior LeKendric Longmire will not be eligible for his senior year because of academics. While Longmire is a solid player who would have been a nice asset to a young and short-handed team given his experience, at this point, one more hit to the roster doesn't really impact the season outlook anymore. Meanwhile, Coach Altman appears to be holding out hope that a couple of incoming transfers could occur within the next week.
- In case you missed it in the comments last night, prep QB Johnny Manziel has changed his verbal commitment from Oregon to Texas A&M. Manziel claimed that distance from home ultimately was the deciding factor, as his family is only three hours away from College Station.
There are a bunch of video interviews included after the jump, so make sure to check them out. Go Ducks!
Here's a video preview of the Ducks getting ready for ASU. The video starts with the OSU - Boise State matchup, so skip ahead 2:25 if you don't care about the Beavers painting their field blue:
Here's Jeff Maehl talking about starting Pac-10 play:
And, here's Brandon Bair discussing the opener at Tempe:
Finally, here's a an audio interview with Ted Miller on 1080 the Fan talking about the top teams in the country: