[CTcard]

Wilner wants to know what's different about this year from 2012 and 2013.

What I see:

2012. We caught the Ducks taking us a little too lightly.After all they had beaten us relatively easily in the last two years when we had Andrew Luck and we no longer had him. Also they had been blowing out teams that we had struggled with or lost to. A good example was DAT not bothering to make a block that would have allowed MM to score early and might have changed the complexion of the game.

Oregon looked pretty charged up for that game to me. We'd been the top two teams in the conference for 2.5 years at that point. DAT never blocked anyone, don't know why you'd expect him to there.

And that counters the Oregon story-line, where the problem is that they were too amped up for the game the past two years.

2013.  We caught the Ducks with MM at less than 100% due to a knee injury, Shaw even commented that he was surprised to see Marcus not making plays that he was normally able to make.

That was the post-facto duck storyline.
I have watched that game many times. Mariotta looked pretty mobile to me until he started getting crushed by the Stanford defense. Many times he ran away from the rush and then was able to throw (not always caught). He also had a nice run to complete a fourth and 8.
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I think that what is really different about this year is first and foremost that Stanford has not yet shown they can put together a decent performance on the road, Stanford has a host of "mistake" problems on offense (to use Hulk's phrase), the Oregon offense is probably even better as Mariota is in his third year and now fairly clearly the best player in the country. Those all point towards the duckies.

[CTcard]

Wilner wants to know what's different about this year from 2012 and 2013.

What I see:

2012. We caught the Ducks taking us a little too lightly.After all they had beaten us relatively easily in the last two years when we had Andrew Luck and we no longer had him. Also they had been blowing out teams that we had struggled with or lost to. A good example was DAT not bothering to make a block that would have allowed MM to score early and might have changed the complexion of the game.

Oregon looked pretty charged up for that game to me. We'd been the top two teams in the conference for 2.5 years at that point. DAT never blocked anyone, don't know why you'd expect him to there.

And that counters the Oregon story-line, where the problem is that they were too amped up for the game the past two years.

2013.  We caught the Ducks with MM at less than 100% due to a knee injury, Shaw even commented that he was surprised to see Marcus not making plays that he was normally able to make.

That was the post-facto duck storyline.
I have watched that game many times. Mariotta looked pretty mobile to me until he started getting crushed by the Stanford defense. Many times he ran away from the rush and then was able to throw (not always caught). He also had a nice run to complete a fourth and 8.
[/quote]

I think that what is really different about this year is first and foremost that Stanford has not yet shown they can put together a decent performance on the road, Stanford has a host of "mistake" problems on offense (to use Hulk's phrase), the Oregon offense is probably even better as Mariota is in his third year and now fairly clearly the best player in the country. Those all point towards the duckies.