Should Stanford Loss Remove Oregon From CFP Consideration?
Does Oregon really still have a case to make the CFP?
In today’s column, the Sports Renassaince Man examines the case for Oregon to be still be considered a College Football Playoff contender. Make sure to type in your email below to never miss a new piece from the SRM.
The PAC-12 has not appeared in the College Football Playoff since 2016. With Oregon’s loss to Stanford on Saturday, that five-year drought figures to drag on a bit longer. This development is even more frustrating for PAC-12 fans when you consider the Ducks took down Ohio State, another preseason CFP favorite, on the road in Columbus in Week 2. It was a gigantic win for head coach Mario Cristobal and his team. The Buckeyes were the biggest Litmus test on the Ducks’ schedule and they passed with flying colors. With their loss to the Cardinal, the Ducks’ path to the CFP got a lot more difficult, a path Kai from The Circle knows all too well once Calvin was eliminated from the competition.
With the loss to Stanford, the Ducks opened the door for Cincinnati to potentially crash the party, although we will need to see it to believe it in regards to the committee actually putting a Group of 5 school into the Playoff.
They opened the door for Wake Forest or Boston College.
They opened the door for BYU or Oklahoma State.
Suddenly, the possibility of the two SEC teams and two Big Ten teams making the playoff does not seem all that crazy. It almost seems crazy if it does not. If Oklahoma falls on Saturday in the Red River Shootout versus Texas, it could happen.
It probably should happen.
The college football collective universe agrees that it is clear that Alabama and Georgia are giants among men this season. If both were to not qualify for the playoff it would be more of a surprise than Khaleesi The Dog finding a dead animal carcass she did not want to roll around on. That’s saying something, and you don’t even know my dog. To win a championship this season, you will need to be able to defeat the Bulldogs and the Crimson Tide, consecutively, potentially. Anthony Brown and the Ducks are not capable of that. Most are not, and that includes the Bearcats.
On Saturday, No. 3 Iowa plays host to No. 4 Penn State in a battle of Big Ten unbeaten juggernauts. In the past, a game of this magnitude in the Big Ten has featured a bit more red, Ohio State and Wisconsin, namely, but those two schools don’t have it this year. For Ohio State, it’s the defense. For Wisconsin, it’s the offense. This year, the Hawkeyes versus the Nittany Lions is akin to the Bulldogs versus the Crimson Tide. We are ever so close to the midway point of the college football season and it does seem as though the four best teams the committee could place in the CFP includes two Big Ten and two SEC schools.
On a neutral site, would Penn State and Iowa not be favored against the Ducks or Oklahoma? Now that we know just how limited Ohio State is defensively this season, that win for Oregon in Columbus does not look nearly as important as it would have over Penn State or Iowa, no? It’s October 7 and it just feels like we already have learned who the best four teams in college football are this season and Oregon is not one of them.
Most of this falls on Anthony Brown.
Brown is not even the best quarterback in his own state. The rival Oregon State Beavers are 4-1 and sit in the top spot of the PAC-12 North as of this writing. The Beavers may not have as many blue-chippers as the Ducks, but that did not matter against USC when the former drubbed them in Los Angeles for the first time in forever. If Chance Nolan was under center for the Ducks, maybe we are having a different conversation about their playoff candidacy. Since becoming a starter, Nolan has a 90 PFF passing grade. His two best games? On the road at USC and Purdue. Brown on the road? 41.4 at Stanford and a 65.0 at Ohio State. Brown’s limitations are fine at Kentucky, but they are devastating at Oregon.
It would not be fair to pin this entirely on Brown, though.
Sure, he is a major reason to exclude even an 11-1 Oregon team from the Playoff, but it is not as though Spencer Petras or Spencer Rattler have lit the world on fire, either. The Ducks’ problems go deeper than that. Oregon is 49th in scoring defense. Oregon is 113th in pass defense. (Note: This is worse than the Buckeyes, somehow.) The Ducks are 26th in scoring offense. The Ducks are 81st in passing offense. With Iowa and Oklahoma, they are elite defensively even if they are not offensively. With Penn State, they are elite both offensively and defensively. The Ducks simply don’t have anything to hang their hat on.
It does not help the Ducks figure to be favored in every game after this loss to Stanford. That Ohio State victory in September may have held more weight in November now that we have seen the Buckeyes put together the best offense in college football this season. The only real remaining roadblock for Oregon is at UCLA in a few weeks. After the Bruins defeated LSU to open the season this seemed like a bigger matchup. Now, it won’t mean as much if Oregon and C.J. Verdell run all over the Bruins. Washington is down. Washington State is down. Utah is down. USC is down. As good as Jonathan Smith’s Beavers are, nobody is changing their opinion on Oregon after the Civil War. It might come down to the emergence of freshman QB Ty Thompson relieving Brown and lighting the PAC-12 on fire. Without some sort of jolt, the PAC-12 and the Oregon Ducks should not plan to qualify for the Playoff this season.
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