Oh Sure NOW Oregon Is Good Enough To Win the National Championship

Bill Plaschke is the first person to ever have a West Coast bias. We all know about the East Coast bias that is often seen among the media, but Bill Plaschke has a West Coast bias, and you don't often see that. What confuses me is that he takes out his West Coast bias on a West Coast football team, the Oregon Ducks. Maybe he just has a California bias. That's probably more likely. Now that Oregon has beaten USC he thinks they are good enough to win the National Championship. Before that, not so much, but once you beat USC you are a National Championship contender, as the 3-7 Washington Huskies can attest.

The title of the article is "Oregon fits the bill as No. 1 college football team." Get it? Ducks have bills and Oregon's mascot is the duck. It's humorous!

I can't duck it anymore.

Apparently Jay Leno is now writing the jokes for Bill Plaschke.

This is how Plaschke started his column about Blake Griffin off a few days before he wrote this one:

You've got to be Blakin' kidding me.

This is journalism people. Read it, study, but please don't copy it because it's terrible. See the hook of a terrible opening sentence in a column makes people read more to see if the rest of the column sucks even worse. It gets pageviews and makes the newspaper money on ads, which helps prop up the actual newspaper delivered every morning. So basically bad journalism is helping keep print media alive.

I'm going to stop being so daffy about it.

They're ducks! Daffy Duck is also a duck! Sports journalism lives!

Oregon deserves a spot in the national championship game right now.

Cancel the season. Fuck you, all you other undefeated teams. You don't deserve a spot in the national championship because you didn't beat USC.

No seriously, that's the entire point of this article.

It was USC's title game, and Oregon kicked the BCS out of the Trojans.

So again, to sum it up...USC tried really, really hard to beat Oregon and failed to do so. By beating a currently unranked team that tried really, really hard and has been consistently good in the past, this means Oregon deserves to be in the National Championship game.

It was the first time the top-ranked Ducks had truly been hit in the mouth, and they just grinned.

Over here on the East Coast, we know that Oregon got punched right in the mouth by Tennessee earlier this year and were down 13-3 late in the 2nd quarter on the road. They grinned and then scored 45 consecutive points. Tennessee is not a good team, but hit Oregon good in the beginning. That was actually the first time Oregon had gotten hit in the mouth this year.

The second time Oregon had gotten hit in the mouth was by a little team called Stanford, a team that is ranked now, was ranked #9 at the time Oregon played them, and also happens to be a very good team. Stanford happened to be up 21-3 on Oregon when Oregon began to come back. I believe that counts as getting punched in the mouth.

At no point during the USC game was USC up by more than 3 points. That's a field goal. That's three points. But Plaschke thinks Oregon got hit in the mouth hard by USC because they played the Ducks close. Yet, Oregon had been down by much more than that this year and come back. USC was not the first team to hit Oregon in the mouth, not at all.

It was the first time the Ducks had been enveloped by 80,000 hostile screams, and they just roared.

It was the first time they had been enveloped by 80,000 hostile screams. That's true. They were enveloped by 102,000 hostile screams at Tennessee though. I'm not great at math, but I am pretty sure 102,000 is more than 80,000. Both points Plaschke tries to make at the beginning of this column that made the USC game special are wrong. So basically, Plaschke is wrong on his first two points in this column and beating USC doesn't prove anything that hasn't already been proven...yet he keeps writing.

USC wasn't ready for this. Nobody is ready for this.

Except for Stanford who went up 18 points...then got blown away by Oregon. I hear Oregon uses the "blur offense." I wish there were someone who could tell me more about that.

Oregon is now 8-0 and, in four games, here's guessing it will be 12-0. Even with Arizona coming to Eugene and Oregon State waiting in Corvallis, the Ducks will not play a tougher game all season.

Except when they beat a currently 7-1 Stanford team that was ranked #9 when they played Oregon. Other than that, beating a newly ranked USC team was much more impressive.

I can no longer make jokes about a "gimmick" offense that gained 599 yards, including 239 yards rushing by James, who would have already been given the Heisman Trophy if he played in Tuscaloosa.

I can't necessarily argue with that statement. What's it mean when the defending Heisman Trophy candidate isn't even the best running back on his own team? It means Nick Saban is a great recruiter.

So Plaschke could joke about the "gimmick" Oregon offense when it put 52 points up on a Stanford team that hasn't given up more than 30 points in a game this year just one other time? How about when Oregon hung 60 on a UCLA team that has not given up more than 35 points before or since that time? USC has given up 36 points to Hawaii, 32 points to Washington, and 37 points to Stanford, but USC still has a great defense that should be the measuring stick against which Oregon should base itself?

I can no longer poke fun at a "soft" defense that knocked around quarterback Matt Barkley and his star receivers, causing bad passes and thumping drops and a rising temper in Coach Lane Kiffin.

It was beating a just-ranked USC team that shows Oregon's defense isn't soft obviously. USC isn't a terrible team, but Plaschke is wrong in believing they are the measuring stick in the Pac-10 this year.

I will no longer even keep reminding Oregon of how its funky offensive system was overpowered against Ohio State in last season's Rose Bowl, because this is clearly not last year's team.

It's the "blur offense" dammit! Don't make Gregg Easterbrook write a 10,000 word column incorrectly describing how this offense works. He will do it.

If Bill Plaschke was basing his opinion of Oregon on last year's Oregon team and not the seven games Oregon had played this year before playing USC then he is an even bigger idiot than I thought.

I will no longer keep saying that Oregon will have no chance against an SEC team if they meet in this year's bowl, because for all of Auburn and Alabama's skill, they simply do not have the combination of athlete and playbook that Oregon possesses, not this time.

I don't know if I will go that far. Auburn and Alabama are pretty good teams. I do have to wonder why Plaschke doesn't mention TCU and Boise State at all in this column. They are undefeated, while Alabama has one loss.

With previously unbeaten Michigan State and Missouri losing Saturday, Oregon, currently No. 2 in the Bowl Championship Series standings, will surely retain one of the top two spots if it wins its final four games, putting it in the BCS title game in Glendale, Ariz.

Yes, I believe they will retain this spot also, but not because they beat USC, but because of their entire track record this year. They have been very good all year, not just against USC.

I can't imagine the crowd there being nastier than Saturday night's.

Bill Plaschke hasn't attended any other Oregon games (obviously) so he doesn't know if this is true or not. I am sure the Oregon State crowd is going to be pretty brutal the last week of the season and what I know of Tennessee fans they aren't incredibly quiet at home games either...especially when they number over 100,000 strong.

I can't imagine the Ducks falling behind as many times as on Saturday night. I understand now that none of that will matter.

It doesn't matter how many times they fell behind. It matters how many points they have been behind and the quality of the opponent they fell behind. They have fallen behind by more points to a better team than USC. So USC hasn't been Oregon's biggest test so far, no matter how much Plaschke wants to believe this is true.

It was the start of a 24-0 run to end the game, the BCS colliding with the NBA.

I don't know exactly what this means. I think you see 24-0 runs to close out a game more often in football than in the NBA.

"We honestly thought coming into this game that we had a good chance of beating them, but that offense is better than a lot of people thought," USC defensive end Wes Horton said.

As in, like, me.

Well, if Oregon shocked Plaschke with how good they are then that must mean they are a great team. If a team can beat the Trojans AND impress Bill Plaschke then clearly that's all a team needs to do to make the national championship game. Nevermind Oregon has played like the one of the top 2 teams in college football all year while beating another Top-10 team, because beating a barely ranked team and impressing Bill Plaschke is all it takes to make the national championship.

How good was Oregon? It even ran many folks out of the Coliseum's best seats. When the game ended, the Ducks ran along the sidelines and slapped hands with their fans who had moved down to the usually filled front row.

I can tell by all the early departures of Trojan fans that Oregon won't face a nastier crowd this year. USC fans were so nasty they left the game and refused to watch Oregon play. Try to find another crowd that has that much indifference and lack of passion towards watching their team get beat at home. You can't. The USC Trojans have the nastiest fans, when they stick around, which they will do if they don't have to beat traffic.

How good was Oregon? It turned the usually bold Kiffin timid. As Oregon's power became more apparent, there were times when it seemed as if the Trojans' coaching staff backed into a corner and covered up.How good was Oregon? It turned the usually bold Kiffin timid. As Oregon's power became more apparent, there were times when it seemed as if the Trojans' coaching staff backed into a corner and covered up.

Example: In the last two minutes of the first half USC, trailing 22-17, faced fourth and one on its 37. But instead of going for it and keeping that wicked offense off the field, the Trojans punted.

(Lane Kiffin) "This team is just too good."

(Assistant Coach) "What should we do coach, we have scored 17 points so far and have one yard to get a first down. They are such a good team, we can't keep up with them."

(Lane Kiffin) "Assuming we are scared of them and afraid to let them have the ball back, I would say the only logical thing to do would be to punt the ball to them."

I'm a little confused by Plaschke's descriptions of how competitive this game was. So this was the big test for Oregon, yet the nasty USC fans left the game early, USC was scared of Oregon and it was clear that Oregon was the superior team? I'm not sure this is the big defining test for the Ducks.

Two plays later, Thomas threw a 33-yard touchdown pass to Lavasier Tuinei to make it 29-17.

Thanks Gregg Easterbrook for following up on what happened after the punt. That looks like a 12 point lead for the Ducks near halftime. So was this a competitive game or a one-sided game?

Not to quack on about it, but right now, Oregon does that better than anyone.

Nothing says "great sports journalism" by bookending a column about college football with two duck-related puns.

Oregon will probably make the national championship game, and they deserve to, but not because they beat USC. USC isn't a terrible team, but Bill Plaschke clearly hasn't watched college football all year if he thinks this was really the Ducks toughest competition and when they faced the nastiest crowd. This is probably the first Oregon Ducks game he watched all year.