Got a call from #GoDucks football ticket people asking me to buy a ticket to next Thursday's sellout. Uh, then it's not a sellout, fellas.
— Alex Drude (@Alex_Drude) September 25, 2014
This is absolutely true. Last week I got a phone call from the University of Oregon
football ticket office asking me to buy tickets to a sellout.
As of this writing, little more than 30 hours before
kickoff… there are still tickets available for Thursday night’s game against Arizona (7:30
pm, ESPN) through the official Oregon website.
Not secondary market tickets, mind you, but the real thing. Admittedly, the seats
aren’t very good… but it’s nobody’s idea of a sellout right now. Now I know
that they’ll fudge it and say it was a sellout (there’s no way it won’t happen
at this point), but it shows you where the Oregon football program is right
now.
 |
| If you're still hawking tickets, it's not sold out. |
And where is it? Well, it’s ranked second in the
country, but let the Washington State Cougars hang with them before winning
38-31. And this week, it’s hosting the one team that blew them out last season.
You may recall that the Wildcats smoked them in the desert, 42-16. For some reason the last time Oregon got blown out like that wasn’t listed in the
official game notes, so I had to do a little digging. Turns out the
loss to Arizona was the first time that Oregon has lost a game by
more than 25 points since October 4, 2008, when they lost at USC to Pete Carroll, Mark Sanchez and company, 44-10. That
was Mike Bellotti’s last season as head coach. Before that, it was the BYU Las Vegas Bowl abomination of 2006, 38-8. Which was the last game before Chip Kelly was
hired as offensive coordinator. In other words, pretty rare for Oregon football
nowadays.
And while the Arizona offense is not getting the
notoriety of Wazzu for its emphasis on the passing game, it still flings the
ball around an awful lot (365.8 ypg, compared to the Cougs’ nation-leading 480.8).
And it also has a rushing offense. As a result, the Wildcats lead the
conference with 593.8 yards per game, sixth in the country (Oregon, by
contrast, is 10th at 555.3, and Wazzu is 14th at 533). That
means the Oregon defense needs to have gotten much better in lots of ways
during the bye week in order to stop the Wildcat train that’s coming to town.
So it’s easy to see why the game still isn’t yet a
sellout: the Wildcats are better than the Cougars. The team that crushed the
Ducks last fall now comes to Autzen looking nearly as good offensively as the
team the Ducks struggled to put away two weeks ago. In a Thursday night
showcase.
If Marcus Mariota is going to stay a Heisman
candidate, if the Ducks are going to remain an early favorite to make the
College Football Playoff… they have to put Arizona away. The last time Arizona
came to Autzen, the Ducks crushed them 49-0. This game should end up being a
true sellout, because this game ought to be an offensive explosion that comes
down to the final quarter. The Oregon football ticketing office is just hoping
they don’t have to beg me to buy tickets for “sellout” 101 in two weeks.
photo courtesy: twitter.com/oregonducktix
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