Playing Whack-A-Mole with the Duck Issues of the Week

Don't cover basketball here, and don't follow it with the same intensity we apply to football, but Duck fans have to be heartened by the progress that Dana Altman and the players are making in creating a new vision for the basketball team.  An undermanned and undersized  squad has already won three more conference games than many experts thought they might, and they've done it with a very Chip-like brand of heart, defense and hustle.

Winning is infectious, and an athletic climate where teams strive for excellence creates an atmosphere at a university.  It can carry over to track and baseball and golf.  It can envelop new enrollees and young people who consider the university.  It has always meant something special to wear the green and yellow, and there's an identity and a hopefulness that shapes the Ducks.  The progress of the roundballers, uniquely their own, will contribute something important to that climate. 

When football players attend games, or recruits come for their weekends, the passion and pride displayed in that new gym matters.  It becomes an essential part of the fabric of a great university.  You can have a successful football program with a poor basketball program or not much of one at all,  but a school where all the academic and athletic programs are striving for excellence becomes a very special place. 

Here in the Northwest, green and yellow stands for something.  The Ducks are unique.  They have a spirit and a heart you don't find other places.  They have a fierce loyalty to each other.  It's a quality of effort and independent determination that goes back to Steve Prefontaine and Dan Fouts and further still.  It's heartening to see the basketball Ducks go to Mapes and play with that kind of effort.  No one ever rises to low expectations.  At Oregon, the expectations are consistently high on every corner of campus.  It's exciting to see that pride become more tangible, for the bright new colors to inspire a brighter effort.

That said, I'd like to see the football team in school colors at least once a season.  The throwbacks are more than just an ensemble and a uniform option.  They are the heart of a history.

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The quack fiends at ATQ rack up a high score every day with their own brand of quick quips, jibes, jocular asides, and cogent points that reach to the heart of alacrity.  Yesterday they discussed the 9-game conference schedule.  Led by moderator Matt Daddy, they exposed its follies and dangers.  As Matt observed, it's absurd how sacred and inviolable the concept has become in certain quarters, like oversigning and paying quarterbacks in the deep South, when the nine-game slate has only been around a handful of years.

USC's great title teams didn't play nine conference games and a league championship game, and neither will Boise State or the Buckeyes.  Opening on the road in a hostile environment against a top-five team, traveling back-to-back to Stanford and Washington, the 2011 Ducks have a world of promise and the talent to make a repeat visit to the national championship game, but the schedule makers have laid out a much harder road than you'll ever see in Columbus or Boise.

The Elvis of the program has left the building on this one.  "Just tell us who we play,"  he has repeatedly said in his big-balls way. The Ducks are uniquely armored for such a quest, in mind and in ability, but the rest of the conference will certainly suffer.  The five extra losses, when the rest of the top fifty are resting their starters and collecting big paydays in the friendly confines of home, ratchets down perception.  In BCS math there is no such thing as a quality loss.  The opinion makers are all out East, and they are group thinkers with shallow minds, rarely going beyond the agate type of anything that happens west of Norman.

Until the BCS dies its inevitable and undignified death, it sets the standard in college football.  It's an essential part of its absurdity that the whole convoluted process is fundamentally anti-competition.  It rewards cowardice.  It is a triumph of avoiding risk.  Teams get lauded and praised and enriched for taking the easiest road possible.  It is the thunderous triumph of perception and reputation over reality and effort.

This season, Oregon should blast the BCS to hell.  They should march through LSU, Stanford and Arizona like Sherman cutting a flaming swath through an archaic wasteland of indefensible, hidebound, lazy anachronism.  They should win thirteen straight football games and put an end to the whole mess.  The Big Twelve, Big Ten and the SEC dutifully follow the formula and crow loud.  They open with Youngstown State or Chattanooga, schedule a bye before their rivalry game, have a November tuneup to pad their stats against some brand of nobodies, a couple of laughers against the perennially underfunded weak sisters of the conference, the Vanderbilts, Indianas and Iowa States.  They call this tradition and excellence.  It isn't anything like that.  It's a money grab, pure and simple.  It's old men puffing out their chest over an illusion and a fraud.  As always, Robert Smith's venom is misdirected and misspent.

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Here is some unassailable wisdom from a proven source.  You can apply it to football or life or dismiss it as foolishness, but it has provided great comfort to many people in the darkest of hours:

My child, don't lose sight of good planning and insight.  Hang on to them, for they will fill you with life and bring you honor and respect.  They keep you safe on your way and keep your feet from stumbling.  You can lie down without fear and enjoy pleasant dreams.  You need not be afraid of disaster or the destruction that comes upon the wicked, for the Lord is your security.  He will keep your foot from being caught in a trap.  (Proverbs 3:21-26)

In other words, you won't feel pressure if you know what you're doing.  Having a core of belief in your life, a fundamental source of strength and vision, is a tremendous place to start.