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A lot has changed since Oregon and Washington last met.
Welcome back to The I-5 Corridor’s Rereadables, where we periodically revisit some of our favorite game stories from over the years with updated thoughts and footnotes. With No. 1 Oregon hosting Washington on Saturday in both teams’ Big Ten regular-season finale, we wanted to go back and look at the last time these teams played in the Pac-12 championship game to see if any signs pointed toward how the 2024 season would play out.
Here’s our original post from Dec. 2, 2023.
Editor’s note: If you read this story on the web or on the app, footnotes will show when you hover over the number. It’s much less scrolling than in e-mail.
Washington runs out the time on Oregon and Bo Nix’s magical season in final Pac-12 Championship
LAS VEGAS — No one had to tell Bo Nix how much he just lost.
No college quarterback has played this game more. Few quarterbacks have played this game better. And for a few fleeting moments on Friday, it looked like the 23-year-old from Alabama was about to have everything he could have imagined when he transferred to Oregon from Auburn two years ago.1
His Ducks were winning the final Pac-12 Championship game after a 10-point halftime deficit. A berth in the College Football Playoff was right there. So, too, was the Heisman Trophy.
But by the last few ticks of the fourth quarter, the cerebral quarterback whose offense succeeded in 2023 by making play after play after play after play, seemed to know he had none left. Washington had come back and taken the lead, like it always does. Oregon had one timeout.
The math just wasn’t there.
So Nix sat on the bench, next to backup Ty Thompson2, with his helmet resting between his legs and his head buried in a white towel. He didn’t see the holding call that gave the Ducks one extra false shot at life, or the defense’s ensuing failure to stop Dillon Jonhson on third-and-9 with a minute remaining to render Oregon’s hopes futile.
Nix didn’t see UW coach Kalen DeBoer get a Gatorade bath after leading Washington to a 13-0 record, or any of the jubilation on the sideline for that matter. It wasn’t until minutes after the horn sounded on No. 3 Washington’s 34-31 win over No. 5 Oregon that the last person on Oregon’s bench got up and made a beeline to congratulate Washington quarterback Michael Penix Jr.
“It was just one of those things where you wanted the moment to last longer than it can. It’s just a shocking end,” Nix said. “It’s tough when you’re so used to go, go, go, go, that when it ends, it just happens very quickly.”3
It all did. The first quarter came far too fast for an Oregon team that’s spent the last two months preparing for a Huskies team that had daggered them with a pair of three-point wins over the last two years. The Ducks went three-and-out on their first two drives, while Penix and the Huskies carved up an Oregon secondary missing starter Jahlil Florence4
It got worse for the Ducks when defensive lineman Jordan Burch got hurt. Then things hit the fan when starting cornerback Khyree Jackson left the game in the second half. Penix passed for 319 yards. Rome Odunze and Jalen McMillian combined for 17 catches and 232 yards. Even UW’s running game, which ran for only 99 yards against the Ducks in October, shredded Oregon for 157 yards in the rematch.5
Considering all that, give the crowd credit for sticking around for a second half that’ll be replayed over and over inside of homes in Seattle. Because Oregon was good in the second half. The Ducks rattled off 21 unanswered points and even took the lead for the first time at 24-20 with two minutes to play in the third.6 It was such a successful spurt that even Oregon’s miscues, like a Nix interception earlier in the third quarter, felt like they’d end up as footnotes by the time Allegiant Stadium’s PA system blasted “Nowhere to run” to start the fourth quarter.
Last week, the Ducks made sure to let everyone know that was their closing song in Oregon’s 31-7 win over Oregon State.7 This week, for the third time in two years, it was only the team in purple that got the message.
“It’s critical moments,” Lanning said when asked about the nine-point difference in three games. “We were good on fourth down tonight, but we were 3-of-10 on third down. They were 10-of-15. You have to be better on third down. You have to be able to establish the run. Last time we played these guys, we were able to run the ball. We didn’t have that success tonight.
“Credit to them. They’ve been good in critical moments and we didn’t finish.”8
The Huskies will be rewarded as the Pac-12’s only two-time College Football Playoff entry. The Huskies will be rewarded as the last Pac-12 champion. And Penix might very well be rewarded with a hypothetical jump over Nix and LSU’s Jayden Daniels in the Heisman rankings.9
Just before Nix’s postgame press conference in defeat, Penix stood on the Pac-12 stage with the game’s MVP trophy in his throwing hand while his teammates showered him in “Heisman” chants. ESPN’s Holly Rowe asked what it meant to the senior quarterback.
“It means the world to me,” Penix said.10
It meant the world to Nix, too.
“I’m going to miss college football,” Nix said after what might be his final game as an Oregon Duck. “It was my goal my entire life to be a college quarterback and to win a national championship. It’s disappointing to lose a game like this for many reasons.”11
— Tyson Alger, The I-5 Corridor
I was looking for what I wrote when Nix transferred to Oregon back in late 2021, but apparently I thought so little about the move I didn’t offer to opine. I did, however, have Justin Ferguson from the Auburn Observer on the podcast. And I think he sounded pretty smart.
“In Oregon, Nix a fresh start,” Justin said. “He’s got a similar face with Kenny Dillingham as OC, and the talent level at Oregon compared to the talent level in the rest of the Pac-12 means you’re always going to have a chance to put up some numbers.”
Shout out to Justin, by the way, who brought his independent Auburn coverage to the Maui Invitational this week. In his words, you absolutely love to see it.
As is tradition here at The Rereadables, here is your Ty Thompson update: the former Oregon backup is now the backup quarterback at Tulane. And while he lost out on the starting job in fall camp to freshman Darian Mensah, Thompson has found himself a nice role as the team’s Wildcat quarterback. Thompson has 243 rushing yards and six touchdowns for the 9-3 Green Wave.
Reflecting a year later, it’s hard to really put in perspective the hole it felt Oregon was in there. In two years, the Ducks had three gut-wrenching losses to Washington by a combined nine points. Every single one of those games could be picked apart to find a handful of moments that would change the outcomes. The Ducks played one of the best seasons in their program’s history, and it wasn’t good enough at the hands of a rival who was also making the jump with them to the Big Ten the next year. Sure Penix was leaving, but with the stability of DeBoer, it certainly felt like the Huskies were gearing up for a run of relevance.
Then Alabama came calling.
I didn’t put a period on this sentence. I’d change it, but I believe in the purity of the Rereadables. You wouldn’t ask The Beatles to go back and fix a missed note on an old record, would ya? Florence, by the way, hasn’t played since suffering that knee injury last year. However, he did post a photo of himself on Twitter this week that seems to suggest his return is only a matter of time. Lanning said we’ll just have to wait and see who takes the field when it comes to Florence, Burch and Tez Johnson on Saturday.
I don’t think this Oregon team is a whole lot better than last year’s. The quarterback play is about the same. The running back play is about the same and the offensive line play hasn’t been quite as good. But if you were to ask me why Oregon is No. 1 this year after never reaching said heights last year, I’d have two answers for you:
A. Michael Penix Jr. is in the NFL right now.
B. Oregon’s so much deeper on defense. Despite Burch and his six sacks missing nearly the entire second half of the season, the Ducks have thrived because they’re able to throw athletic body — Matayo Uiagalelei — after athletic body — Teitum Tuioti — after athletic body — Derrick Harmon — at the opposition’s offensive front. There’s not just one guy to take down with this team. And if you can get Burch and Florence healed up by the postseason, it’s scary the potential this group has.
The Ducks apparently dipped their 2024 allotment of third-quarter points in this game.
I’ve never loved an Oregon staff more for appreciating the art of a good message or story — and we’ve seen that explode in popularity in 2024 with the team’s “Ducks vs. Them” series. I love that they lean into these. I also feel fairly threatened by just how good they are with the access they’re allowed.
Think of the critical moments this year. The big fourth down against Wisconsin? The Ducks got it. The onside kick against Ohio State? They nailed it. Or how about when, in Week 2, Dillon Gabriel led the Ducks on a 61-yard drive on the game’s final possession to set his team up for a game-winning field goal against a Boise State team that we’ve now learned is pretty damn good? I thought a lot of the “Dan Lanning is too aggressive” and “Dan Lanning can’t win big games” talk was so premature over the last year. The guy has coached less than three full seasons of football. That’s such a small sample size. And while he took his share of painful losses early on, at some point the cards start to even out.
Penix would finish second to Daniels in Heisman voting. Nix came in third.
After the game and after they were both done with media, Nix and Penix met just outside the locker rooms. They hugged, then Nix gave Penix a gentle squeeze of the ribs. “I don’t know why everyone keeps thinking I’m hurt,” he said. Penix would take a further beating in the national championship game against Michigan, finishing the 34-13 loss with a pair of interceptions.
I thought Nix’s legacy would be college. He played for so long. He had such an intriguing story. And to me, it felt tragic — well, as tragic as it can get for a very loved kid from a very well-off family — to fall just short of winning one of those games that stamps a collegiate legacy. However, this would not be his final game as an Oregon Duck. Two days later, Nix announced he would stick around for the Fiesta Bowl against Liberty, where he’d throw for 363 yards and five touchdowns in Oregons’ 45-6 win. He finished his Oregon career with a 22-5 record, finished his collegiate career with the second-most total yards in NCAA history and would go on to be selected by the Denver Broncos with the 12th overall pick. He is 100 percent the case study the Ducks will show every portal quarterback in the future when they want to dip their toes in those waters again. And, with 15 touchdowns against two interceptions in his last eight games, it looks like Nix is well on his way to crafting a legacy beyond those 61 starts he made in college.
