Greetings, another Duck fan here. Hoping to learn more about ISU ahead of the Fiesta and share what little I could glean from Oregon’s six game season.
First of all, congrats on your NY6 bowl invite. For some reason I though we were going to draw Oklahoma and was pleasantly surprised to learn we get a first time tilt with a very good Cyclones team. The last time the Sooners played at Autzen some legitimate reffing shenanigans occurred on an onside kick and it would not have been fun hearing from an already arrogant fan base rub that in our digital faces for two weeks.
I know very little about ISU and only watched parts of two games. My first impression, though, is that Purdy spins a very nice football. I’ve much more to learn about your formations and concepts.
As far as the Ducks I chalk up the inconsistent performances mostly to youth and a lack of reps. In a normal season a team get three cupcakes (tho we did have Ohio State on the OOC docket this year) to tune up before conference play. Out of the gate expectations were high and Oregon played pretty well. Shough, the new QB, played very well and then regressed significantly in the last three games.
The losses against Cal and Oregon State IMO can largely be attributed to the run defense being pooh. Oregon lost a four year starter at Mike who is replaced by a very highly touted, but nickel bright true freshman. Other teams regularly ran RPOs, our Mike would bite on the run, and then throw shallow crosses across the middle. I’m not dogging our freshman Mike for the losses but on the whole the front seven played pretty mediocre until the USC game. Not to say there weren’t lots of excellent individual performances, but as a group, the defense - especially the D line - weren’t in top form for most of the very short season.
On the offensive side, I’ve seen others refer to Oregon as a pistol offense. Not to disagree, but I would characterize them more as a pro set, pass first, read option. The Ducks will often line up three or four wides and the tendency is to look for the pass first if it’s there. The run game has also improved as the all new offensive line has improved. Oregon has three fast quality running backs.
I did not even know we have a QB grad transfer from BC (Anthony Brown) until the USC game. Given his performance I think your defensive staff will be spending some time trying to plan for packages he may run in the Fiesta.
For those of you wants to know more about Oregon’s roster a good resource is Chile Duck’s Depth Chart:
https://web.nmsu.edu/~ogden/oregon/depthchart.html
www.espn.com
