Slingin’ Quack: We Sound Mad, But We’re Not

Throughout this podcast both of us sound pretty negative at times. But we are actually pretty optimistic about the rest of the season. I start off the podcast with a rant about officiating in the PAC-12. The issue really hit a tipping point on Saturday. Even though WSU was clearly the better team and the calls didn’t matter, it’s a repeated exhibit of incompetence and apathy towards said incompetence which has become a national joke and is wrongfully impacting games on a weekly basis. So that’s six of the first 9 minutes of the pod.

We move on to recapping the game against Washington State. The strides that the defense has made have been nothing short of astonishing. Leavitt is getting paid a lot by the athletic department but he has certainly earned it so far. Troy Dye has been an absolute force in the middle of the field. Springs and Jelks have also caught the attention of Pro Football Focus.

Ultimately, we have a true freshman quarterback who looked like a true freshman quarterback against one of the better defenses in the conference. He made some freshman mistakes and struggled at times but I think he’ll have a much better second game after simply having a start under his belt. The offense made it harder, especially the line by not getting much of a push on first down or on the fourth down tries. Washington State did a good job of making late shifts and stunts on the defensive line that were effective in causing confusion.

The advanced stats are not giving the Oregon the edge at all against Stanford but is predicting results that are closer than the experts think. The Cardinal are one dimensional and it will be up to the Oregon front seven to make this game close and the offensive line needs to have a better running game, and probably a better game-plan on offense, for a chance to win this one.

One of the topics we didn’t cover is that a Stanford outside linebacker and defensive linemen were ejected for targeting on the last drive of the Utah game, so they will both miss the first half of the game this weekend.

Ifo Bomaye and I have a long conversation near the end of the podcast addressing the trend of fans leaving early from Duck games. We’re pretty understanding of the situation with night games and we do not believe in fan-shaming. This also leads into a short discussion about selling alcohol at college sporting events, which we disagree on.

Lastly, we look to the upcoming weekend of football. There are a lot of games with double-digit spreads but will be pretty telling about the teams involved. Oklahoma plays Texas, West Virginia plays Texas Tech, and with San Jose State at Hawai’i capping off the night.