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The Ducks are being elevated from Featured Player to Cast Member.
The Oregon crowd helped win that one, no doubt about it.
Despite a bit of red inside the bowl, the Autzen Stadium crowd went full jet engine on Saturday. We tried to warn those coming from Columbus — and the roar in Eugene led to some of the better internet memes in the days after Oregon’s 32-31 win.
From Zach Neel over at Ducks Wire:
That’s good stuff, and it showed the rest of the country what everyone around here already knew: Despite its size, Oregon has as good of a home-field advantage as anyone in the nation.
But as the Oregon Ducks rose to No. 2 this week, and those lofty preseason expectations are beginning to feel more plausible, there will be a time when that edge becomes moot.
The Big Ten Championship game is held in Indianapolis. If the current rankings hold, the Ducks would have a first-round bye in the playoffs and play their first game at a bowl location. And while this weekend proved that Oregon is no longer playing catch-up when it comes to talent, depth and coaching, these are the games where you will see where Oregon still needs to go.
The Ducks had one of the best traveling fanbases in the Pac-12, but that wasn’t really saying much in neutral1 site matchups over the years against Auburn, Georgia and those Buckeyes. AT&T Stadium for the national championship game in 2015 had a drop of green in an ocean of red. Even in Rose Bowls on the West Coast against Wisconsin and Florida State, Oregon fans couldn’t overwhelmingly shift the imbalance.
The Ducks aren’t some upstart team, but there are programs out there with much larger alumni bases whose success on a national stage dates back further than the turn of this century. That adds up, which is why Oregon has had to play offensive away from the field once it decided to get serious. The billboards, the uniforms, the inflatables — all strokes of marketing genius to get more eyeballs on a team up here in the Northwest that, for the last 20 years, has been a Featured Player on the national stage but never been elevated to full Cast Member status.
But when given the platform, the successes of players like Marcus Mariota and De’Anthony Thomas influenced the decisions of the next generation of Ducks. Oregon went from a program that depended on diamonds in the rough during the Chip Kelly era to one that dominated California recruiting under Mario Cristobal to one that, on Saturday, beat the No. 2 team in the country with a quarterback from Hawaii handing off to a running back from Tennessee running behind an offensive line whose homes span from Seattle to Harlem.
The Ducks hauled in a Mack truck from Detroit in Derrick Harmon to blow up blockers, the Buckeyes had to put two guys on California’s Matayo Uiagalieli coming off the edge and, through seven weeks, Pro Football Focus’ top-rated linebacker in the nation is that Bryce Boettcher kid from just up the road.
Oregon’s collection of elite athletes beat Ohio’s elite athletes in front of dozens of elite prospects both schools are fighting over. They also played in front of a nationally televised audience that NBC announced as the most-watched Big Ten football game on NBC and Peacock since 2008, and averaged 10.2 million viewers.
One of those recruits, Tomuhini Topui, a top-100 defensive lineman, committed to Oregon on Sunday, improving UO’s 2026 recruiting class to the best in the nation.
“I mean, am I pleased with the growth that we’ve had so far? Absolutely, and every single person’s a part of that,” Oregon coach Dan Lanning said on Saturday. “Not just me, not just our coaches, not just our players, it’s the whole community, the whole University of Oregon, our fans, the elite players making the decision to come here — and they’ve got options to go anywhere in the United States — all those things add up.”
The marketing isn’t going to stop now. It’ll ramp up, if anything, as Oregon has more than just a vision to sell. Yes, there’s still plenty of room to grow. And if the Ducks do play Ohio State again later in the year, you can expect a whole lot of Buckeye fans taking advantage of the short drive to Indianapolis. But after the Ducks spent the weekend as the talk of college football for something they did on the field, you can bet there will be more (insert whatever color Oregon would hypothetically be playing in) in Lucas Oil Stadium than there would have been a week ago.
“We talk about one plus one plus one,” Lanning said. “That’s how you get real gains. Everything matters.”
— Tyson Alger, The I-5 Corridor
I know, I know — playing Georgia in Atlanta and Auburn in Dallas isn’t exactly neutral.
