Slingin' Quack Slingin Quack

Ifo Bomaye and I are back for our last scheduled episode of Addicted To Quack. We are going through the football roster and giving our year-end awards.

We select our most improved, most under-appreciated, most fun, and breakout player for this year on offense and defense. We also give our prediction for who the breakout player will be next year. This isn’t a standard MVP-type award show where the answer is really obvious and a no-brainer. We take a pretty good look through the roster.

The next signing day is coming up and we address some of the positions of need and what we hope to see. I have a policy of only mentioning the names of players who have signed letters of intent so you won’t get specific names of players who haven’t committed but are clear commits or are the favorites, just FYI.

We recorded this pod last week before the weekend’s basketball games. I wasn’t able to get the episode up until the weekend. Ifo Bomaye breaks down the basketball season thus far and we give a quick shoutout to the women’s basketball team.

Ifo Bomaye and I are back after taking a week off and luckily not much happened.

First, we talk about Mario Cristobal as our new head coach. We discuss the other coaches that were interviewed including Leavitt, Sumlin, and Harsin. No coach was a perfect candidate and we weight the pros and cons for each. Ifo Bomaye and I disagreed on our preferred coach when the search began but we both believe that right now we are in a best-case scenario given the circumstances.

Following that we move to preview the Las Vegas Bowl against Boise State. I had just finished parsing through the advanced stats that you can find at Football Study Hall so was ready with some fun facts.

Both of us think that Oregon will pull off the win and cover the spread. I have picked against Oregon in most games against the spread, so I’m feeling pretty confident about this matchup. Looking at some of the advanced stats like S&P+, IsoPPP, and efficiency ratings we see some pretty clear trends on how the game could go.

Lastly, we take a look at what the Oregon men’s basketball team has shown the last two weeks during non-conference play. Ifo Bomaye has a pretty detailed rundown on what stands out to him thus far.  

Oregon put the Beavers in the dirt in the 2017 Civil War game. In all three phases of the game, Oregon looked completely prepared for anything that came at them. Special teams, offense, and defense, dominated all four quarters.

With some of the talk coming from Oregon State athletes leading up to the game, and on the O in Autzen, it wasn’t much of a surprise to see some pettiness from some Duck players, in the best way possible.

Players wore raincoats after the game when shaking hands and even Rob Moseley was making tweets referencing warm jackets that he was wearing in the press box.  

It was also great seeing the players have so much fun. Big shoutout to the senior leaders for rebounding so well from last season and keeping the squad together through the rough part of the schedule. Mid-seasons like that can ruin team chemistry and it says a lot how well the team played when the passing attack was back.

fo Bomaye and I are back for a new bag with some of the most potent quack. Obviously, we open with our recap of the win over Arizona. Leavitt’s gameplan was executed phenomenally by the defensive line and the secondary.

We liked seeing so much fire on defense, even though it sometimes led to penalties. One of the biggest takeaways we both had from this game is how no one on the team seemed to give up on each other. The last few weeks were full of moments that could have divided the team and I think it says a lot about the team leaders that the team stayed unified.

Having Herbert back was obviously a huge change in offensive efficiency. The presence and continual threat of a deep ball opened up the entire offense. Freeman averaged over 7 yards per carry and had 4 rushing touchdowns. Taggart didn’t call too many more pass plays than normal. Something I didn’t get to on the pod was that the offense’s identity is all power running. On the 94-yard touchdown drive at the beginning of the second half, only 14 yards came through the air. The line is firing on all cylinders and the running threat is going to be much more potent at the start of next year.

We didn’t cover the coaching carousel. That will probably happen next week.

The logical transition was to go to recruiting. We took a preliminary look at the 2018 football recruiting class and covered some general takeaways without naming specific people. Any recruiting talk wouldn’t be complete without basketball’s number one ranking and Bol Bol’s commitment. Altman is on the cusp of being widely recognized as one of the top basketball coaches in the country.

The Ducks are back after a win over the bye week. We open the pod with the odds of Justin Herbert making the start on Saturday. If he doesn’t play then we can probably expect an offensive performance similar to what we saw against UCLA. If Herbert does get the start, what can we reasonably expect from someone who hasn’t played a game in six weeks?

In order for Oregon to win we probably need to score 40. If not Khalil Tate could really take it to us. He’s going to be a Heisman candidate to start off the season next year and has already rushed for 1000 yards this season. He is the first quarterback in conference history to run for over 1000 yards and he hasn’t played every game this season. We talk about a few of the things Oregon’s defense might use to slow Tate down.

Basketball has played two games and there’s a lot of promise to the season. Troy Brown has looked like the player people expected and has surpassed my expectations. The team has had their stretches of bad basketball but Altman has proven year after year that he will turn his teams into dominant forces in the conference. This is going to be a really fun team to watch.

At the end we discuss the last, crazy weekend of college football before glossing over the rough weekend of games coming up.  

So Saturday’s game was very not chill. After a good start to the game a couple breaks went the Huskies’ way. There was a very small window of opportunity for Oregon to pull out the win without some serious help from PAC-12 After Dark. A red zone fumble and a punt return for a touchdown later and the game was out of hand.

I do want to give a quick shoutout to the Honolulu Oregon Alumni Association. I happened to walk into a sports bar to watch the game Saturday afternoon to find that the alumni association in Hawai’i had actually reserved multiple tables in the place. It was great randomly meeting some great Duck alumni in the middle of the Pacific. Mahalo.

Ifo Bomaye and I talk about some of the popular takes around Burmeister, the team, and what the trajectory of the team is the next season. I think it’s premature to make a definitive statement on how good Burmeister can be. A lot of growth can happen in just a few years and the list of great football players who were written off in their first season is very long.

There’s a huge weekend of college sports coming up this weekend with Oregon basketball kicking off the season on Friday at 9 PM. AT NIGHT. I guess this game was going to be over early anyways so it doesn’t matter too much that people are going to tune out because of how late it is.

This weekend’s college football slate is bananas. You’re going to need a couple screens for every shift. We run down the slate and talk about the playoff implications for each matchup.