Can Anyone Beat Oregon?
By Paul Myerberg // Nov 4, 2010
U.S.C. scored twice in little more than two minutes last Saturday, turning a 29-17 halftime deficit into a 32-29 third quarter advantage. Oregon’s response to this unexpected turnaround was swift, calculated and brutal: 24 unanswered points, cutting a boisterous crowd of 88,726 down to size in a 53-32 victory. The crowd at the Coliseum: going, going, gone. Now eight games into 2010, the Ducks have yet to score less 42 points in a single game; have scored at least 50 five times, including in three of their last four conference games; and have yet to suffer a final margin of victory smaller than 11 points. How does Oregon do it? Better yet, what can anyone do about it? Based on the first two months of 2010, the Ducks might run away with this thing unopposed.
The first question: How does Oregon do it? The mentality is as simple as the offense itself is complicated, in my mind. It’s a mentality: we put our foot on the gas, we put that pedal to the floor and we don’t let up until the final whistle. It’s a mentality ingrained during hours and hours of practice run along the same lines — by the time Saturday comes around, this get-up-and-go philosophy is as normal to Oregon as it is confounding to the opposition.
We could call Chip Kelly a genius, but it would be easier to call his contemporaries Neanderthals, if not something worse. It’s not necessarily a new theory, this non-stop offensive onslaught; it just seems new to the rest of the Pac-10, which has crumbled under Oregon’s march through the conference.
If anything, it seems like Kelly has just mastered — or revitalized — an offensive philosophy with roots in Houston’s run-and-shoot, with branches extending to Texas Tech’s Air Raid offense, to Tulsa’s spread and beyond.
It’s just that no offense has gone full-bore in such a fashion: run or pass, Oregon’s pushing the tempo. That’s an understatement, in fact. There is no metronome capable of keeping time with this offense, with its starting and stopping, passing and running, scoring and scoring — and scoring. Defensively, all you can hope to do is locate the rhythm: if you can just keep pace with Oregon, you provide yourself with the opportunity, slight as it may be, for a turnover or a dropped pass, maybe even a punt.
Easier said than done, of course. As for punting: Oregon does punt, just not that often. You can see the distaste in Kelly’s eyes, however, when he does send out the punting team; Kelly is fine with field goals, it looks like, but he seems to take the idea of punting — of giving the ball back to the opponent in any form other than a kickoff — as a personal affront.
Kelly has cut the brakes on this team: once the pedal goes down, there’s no letting up. So how do you stop a speeding locomotive? You don’t just get in the way and hope for the best, of course. For a team like Washington, for instance, which faces the Ducks without Jake Locker, merely putting up a roadblock — milking the clock, running the ball — is not much of an impediment.
Washington will get snowed under by the Ducks on Saturday, unfortunately. What of California? The Bears have lost Kevin Riley, though we’ll see if the offense can rally around Brock Mansion, his replacement. Arizona nearly got the better of Oregon a year ago, but sloppy play down the stretch allow the Ducks to tie a game they would eventually win in double overtime.
Arizona heads to Autzen Stadium three weeks from tomorrow; the Civil War is eight days later. Nick Foles, if healthy, can help Arizona keep pace offensively with the Ducks. Nevertheless, I can’t help but feel that it’s the Beavers, not the Wildcats, who have the best shot at taking down the Ducks.
How will they do it? Not a clue. And I don’t think the rest of the country knows how to slow down the Oregon offense. I believe it will take an open month of bowl preparation, a defensive mind like Nick Saban, perhaps, poring over miles and miles of film, before the book is written on Chip Kelly and this offense. Until then, well, sit back and enjoy the fireworks. As of today, it doesn’t seem as if anyone can beat the Ducks.
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Tags: Chip Kelly, Oregon
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The formula for beating Oregon would seem to be pretty obvious: You need a ball-control offense to keep the Ducks’ attack off the field, and a fast, athletic defense that’s good at getting some turnovers. Not many teams look like that this year. Maybe Alabama.
Still, as good as Oregon has looked, just remember how often we’ve seen these fancy high-tempo spread teams just get totally shut down at some point in the year. Practically always. Maybe Oregon is different.
Ball control offense and a great, fast, clever defense? I’d give the Huskers a decent chance. I’d love to see the Pelini brothers game plan for Oregon.
A ball control offense doesn’t matter. All that does is limit the number of possessions, which will still kill you with the Ducks if you can’t keep pace. Though that helps (mostly in the fatigue category) the important thing is to get stops.
Stops are what kills the Ducks and keeps you in the game. This seems silly, but this is crucial; it’s far better to give up a 20-yard play and then make them go 3 and out than it is to give up methodical plays over and over. If you can get a turnover, even better. A team that can reliably stop the run and cause turnovers will likely do well against the Ducks even if they give up points.
And to be clear – the part of the Ducks that is different is not the spread offense. There are plenty of ways to beat the spread, and plenty of teams have done so to great success. While the Ducks execute the spread well, it’s not as deadly as Tebow and Florida doing it earlier this decade.
Where the Ducks have changed is combining the spread with the no-huddle and the pace. Very, very few teams have ever gone with the kind of pace the Ducks have done this season. Their time per play is somewhat misleading, as that factors in things like them purposely milking the clock. On actual plays that matter, they average something like 13 seconds per play. They’ve been able to get plays off in as little as 7 seconds. That combined with the spread and misdirection means that defenses must be disciplined and execute very, very fast. That’s the hard part to defend.
Honestly, one of the best ways to defend it is to have good depth on defense and fake a lot of injuries. This is what worked for ASU, and I would be surprised if another coach didn’t try it this season against them.
The way to stop the Ducks is to force them to be one dimensional. That is what Ohio State did last year. However, Thomas is a much better passer than Masoli was and this has prevented defenses from stacking the box AND winning. Teams this year that have stacked the box have been burned in the passing game. Obviously, taking away the passing game is going to leave James to carve up the defense. With the right personnel, Kelly has created a beast. The problem last year was that the offense was rather unbalanced towards the run but that changed this year.
Kal is right on too. If a defense can stop Oregon a few times then they have a better chance at keeping up. However, their offense has to score and Oregon’s defense is doing a good job of keeping teams out of the end zone. They give up yards but they have a good red zone defense. Trading field goals for touchdowns isn’t going to cut it.
Ball control offense? You mean like Stanford? The flaw in this idea is that since the Ducks score so many points, running the ball all game isn’t an option. Besides the fact that Allioti’s defensive philosophy is to stop the run.
The only hope to beat Oregon is to catch them with something unexpected. Pryor last year had the best game of his life against Oregon because of clutch passing and Oregon’s defense missing tackles on third down. Those gaps in defense have been solved…it’s not going to be easy to stop the Ducks this year.
Create turnovers, keep scoring points. There’s your gameplan.
I agree with Paul and DMK – if you give Saban a month of prep time, Bama could pull it off. I would have said the same about TCU and Patterson two weeks ago, but the loss of DL Kelly Griffin to injury for the season really hurts the Frogs – he was a force against the run and they do not have the depth to adequately replace him.
This is the most polite room I’ve seen. It’s rather refreshing. Good luck to all your teams. Go Ducks!
Paul: We’re a nice, kind bunch. Lots of respect for Oregon here. And Boise State. And T.C.U., Utah, Wisconsin, Nebraska and so, so on, so on, etc.
Stopping Oregon is as simple as this: Big, fast defensive line able to pentrate the offensive backfield quickly. Stop the offense before the mesh happens and the QB has time to find a receiver. Got the team to do? We haven’t seen it yet, at least not consistently. But this would work.
If you want to know what it will take to stop Oregon, you should ask what it took to stop Oklahoma two years ago when they were doing the same thing. The answer was an elite defense that had several weeks to prepare for Oklahoma’s fast pace.
Urban Meyer and Charlie Strong actually had two scout team offenses go against the Florida defense in practice. Once one offense had run a play, it would leave and the other offense would run on the field and execute it’s play. Back and forth they went, running off plays every few seconds. In the BCS game, the Gator defense got lined up quickly, and Oklahoma was left looking to the sideline for an audible. The Sooners caught the Gators napping only once or twice the whole contest.
I frankly think Oklahoma anticipated that Florida could use the weeks off to adjust and decided to take their foot off the gas, but that’s just speculation.
That it takes a lengthy amount of preparation to handle this offense is bad news for the rest of the PAC-10, and I don’t expect Oregon to be seriously challenged the rest of the way. It will be interesting to see if their BCS opponent can do any better.
Going back a few years, the 1996 Fiesta bowl was supposed to be a blowout when the new, fast, efficient Gators outplayed and outclassed the ancient, plodding, Huskers.
Give a great, speedy, defense a month to prepare, and wear down the other defense using ball control, running between the tackles, and play action.
It has worked before.
Let me suggest too that maybe Auburn could score with them all the way. Why not? Then it’s just a question of how the ball bounces. We could see something like the Auburn-Arkansas game.
It’s stupid simple, but the way to stop the ducks–is to stop the ducks.
The offensive effect of pace snowballs. The pace doesn’t just keep other teams off guard, it grinds them down to dust. Imagine running a series of fifty of 40-yard sprints. Normal teams give you a half-hour, oregon gives you more like 20 minutes. Much more difficult to keep up, and the last 20 or so are pathetic.
But imagine again, that on those early reps, you could wrangle another 2 minute break after the first 3, then another minute after #8. And eventually, you find out you didn’t have to run the last 10.
This is what happened against Boise St. in the first game of 2009. Boise forced many 3-and-outs in the first half, and the pace never got to them.
You MUST stop the ducks early. You have to prevent the play-count from escalating too quickly. Because the effects multiply as the game goes on. By the 4th quarter that 1st quarter 12-play TD drive feels like 30.
If the ducks get to about 35 plays by half-time, the D is totally cooked by the middle of the 3rd. Then they run away.
This is the Ducks year! Chip Kelly is a mastermind of influence and leadership and nobody can top their offense. Here is a video of Chip talking about his leadership inspiration that I just found. A very interesting concept… http://waterthebamboo.com/blog/press/oregon-ducks-ranked-1