This week you can get The I-5 Corridor for 50 percent off your first year.

Hello there, free subscribers of The I-5 Corridor.

We’re gearing up for the stretch run of the 2024 college football season here, and I’d like to extend an offer to those of you who might be interested in following along our coverage of the No. 1 Oregon Ducks.

This week you can get The I-5 Corridor for 50 percent off your first year.

As a subscriber, you’ll get access to all of our paywalled posts and game coverage, and you’ll be helping out a local journalist who is doing his best to write the type of stories Oregonians deserve in their sports section.

The I-5 Corridor is growing, and I’d sure like to have more of you all along for the ride.

I’ve attached my gamer from Saturday, unlocked, below for anyone who’d like a sample. Have a great week.

Tyson Alger

The No. 1 Oregon Ducks put the state on their shoulders in blasting of No. 20 Illinois

EUGENE — For a few moments, the patch of orange inside of Autzen Stadium Saturday was alive. The fanbase of No. 20 Illinois traveled as well as any of Oregon’s former Pac-12 foes, flying across the country to cheer on an unexpectedly good Illini team that arrived in Eugene this week with a 6-1 record. 

The away crowd booed when the Ducks came out of the tunnel, erupted when the Illinois cheerleaders and flag bearers streaked across the field and even gave a few hearty bellows to the referees in the first quarter. 

So, it’s not that the energy of the orange postage stamp in a sea of yellow had dissipated by the end of the third quarter — it had just changed. With No. 1 Oregon making a Big Ten conference game in October appear like a season-opener against (insert any FCS team other than Idaho here), instead of quitting, the supporters from Champaign decided to stop swimming upstream. 

They got a little bit louder now during ‘Shout’ between the third and fourth quarters with Oregon leading 35-9. They gave some loud “Ba Ba Bas” during Sweet Caroline. And they stayed in their seats far longer than those in Oregon’s student section, who, with a 30-point lead against a quality opponent, decided an afternoon of extra-curricular activities on a relatively dry Saturday would prove more compelling than another quarter of football.

It was Oregon 38, Illinois 9 at the end, and the only storming this time was for the aisles to beat traffic.

“Success only matters if you’re satisfied,” Oregon coach Dan Lanning said after the win, “and I know our team is not.”

The Ducks are 8-0. They have no games left against ranked opponents after Saturday. And while Lanning and his Ducks certainly aren’t satisfied with a season only two-thirds of the way through, at the moment they’ve appeared to hit cruise control.

Those two uneasy wins to start the year in September have given way to a balanced, deep and physical football team that has steamrolled its way through its last six games. Saturday marked the fourth time in the last five games that Oregon has held its opponent below 15 points, following up last week’s shutout of Purdue on the road with a dominating home performance that was a Derrick Harmon unsportsmanlike penalty¹ in the fourth quarter away from being Oregon’s second straight without allowing a touchdown.

The Ducks nearly doubled Illinois in total yardage (527 to 293). Seven players caught multiple passes, four players rushed for more than 20 yards and Dillon Gabriel accounted for four touchdowns while moving into No. 2 in NCAA history in total passing yards.

“I’m chasing wins, dude. That’s where I’m at,” Gabriel said of passing Hawaii’s Timmy Chang. “That’s been the goal of mine for a long time, but now more than ever. When you play a long career like I have, you realize a lot of things, and I choose winning 100 percent of the time.”

There will be little complaints in this state about that one. Until the Ducks took the field, this had been a pretty bleak time for Oregon sports. The Blazers lost their season-opener by 34 points to Golden State, then followed it up by blowing a fourth-quarter lead to New Orleans. The Portland Timbers lost their Wild Card playoff game 5-0 to Vancouver on Wednesday, then followed it up with two days of pointing fingers. The Portland State Vikings have one win. The Oregon State Beavers lost by 37 points to Cal on Saturday.

Heck, nobody still knows what happened to that Arena League team in Salem.

Yet here are Lanning’s Ducks, undefeated and largely unquestioned in their standing as the country’s current No. 1 team. No. 2 Georgia was on a bye, No. 4 Ohio State barely beat Nebraska and Texas held on for dear life against Vanderbilt. And the only time Illinois appeared to have any life on Saturday, the Ducks quickly snuffed it out.

See, before things got completely out of hand, Illinois tried to take a trick out of the Ohio State playbook. Facing second-and-11 from its own 34 in the second quarter, Illinois quarterback Luke Altmyer dropped back, surveyed the field and fired a bullet up the right sideline to wide receiver Pat Bryant. Initially, it appeared Bryant hauled in the catch for a 24-yard gain — Illinois’ largest of the game at the time. But quickly, the Autzen Stadium crowd began to voice its displeasure in the call. As the referees huddled, Illinois hurried to the line with Altmyer nearly getting a snap off before the play was ruled dead for review.

The ball came out. The call was overturned. And on the ensuing third down, Devon Jackson and Brandon Johnson brought down Altmyer in the backfield with a sack to force a punt. The Ducks would score on their ensuing drive to go up 28-3 with 6:09 to play in the first half.

And sure, Lanning can point to a stagnant third quarter, or the one mistake of a throw Gabriel made late in the game that was picked off, or a defense that dared to allow nine whole points as areas to improve. And yes, one can understand the coach’s “Who cares?” approach to being the No. 1-ranked team in October.

But after the muck all the other teams in this area dragged Oregonians through the last week, the 59,830 who sat in the sun at Autzen to watch a really good football team care enough to know that things could be much, much worse.

— Tyson Alger, The I-5 Corridor