Tako Tuesdays Says Burn it All to the Ground

Oregon lost to Arizona, at home, for the second straight year, and looked pretty bad doing it. The offensive line was overmatched for the second straight game, Marcus Mariota wasn't his usual worldbeating self, and not a feck was to be found on the defensive side of the ball. Plum out of fecks. What is to be done about the increasingly-common sight of Oregon as "just another football team" that loses to third-world programs like Arizona?

The answer is simple: blow it all up, and start over. Fire Don Pellum. Fire Scott Frost. Fire Mark Helfrich. Shutter the Hatfield-Dowling Complex. Strip the hydrographics off the helmets. Have Jeff Lockie take snaps under center, with a fullback behind him. Let's just start all over. Because everyone knows that when a pipe bursts in your bathroom, or the washing machine stops working, or the lightbulb on your front porch goes out, or some shithead teenagers knock over your mailbox, the only reasonable thing to do is set the house on fire, sit in lawn chairs and watch it burn to the ground, and then find a brand new house.

Or...

We can all calm the hell down and watch some football. That seems more reasonable. But here's what we as fans have to do before we can accomplish that task. We have to admit that Oregon football is done being a cut above the rest in the west, and we have to let that expectation of dominance go for good. We have to, for the first time since, really 2006 or so, enter every single game with the idea that we might lose. This is not to say that we will lose every game, because we won't. Oregon still has a better chance than most teams of winning out and earning a spot in the College Football Playoff. But Oregon has taken a step back via injuries and underachieving; more importantly, as we saw last week with virtually the entire conference, the Pac-12 is trending up. There isn't a pushover team in this conference anymore; even Colorado at 0-3 is not a guaranteed win, as Oregon State and Cal have already found out this year. If you're still one of those fans (like me) who feels 100% confident on game day, cut it out immediately, because you shouldn't be, especially not this Saturday, when Oregon and UCLA meet in a de-facto FBS playoff elimination game. We could definitely lose, and Oregon would have their first regular season losing streak since December 2007. And UCLA is not the only team left that can take down the Ducks. This season may kill you.

And that's okay.

This is college football. It's supposed to try and kill you. We've been really spoiled the last few years, what with the easy conference wins and the panic-that-isn't-really-panic-because-we're-just-kidding. But that was Chip Kelly's voodoo magic, a deal made with the devil to see into the future of college football, and to get there a couple years earlier than everybody else. But the world has caught up. Now, we can get back to the way things should be: abject terror, and the thought of imminent doom at any moment.

Or, you know, we could set that fire. I like fire. Fires are fun. They smell nice, they're hot, and they're quite pretty to look at. Sometimes they make sparks and everybody goes, "Ooooooooh". And when everything is burning, you don't think about the mess of ash and char you'll have to clean up in the morning.