Broncos Try to Give Away Game, Ducks Want None of It; Ends In Loss.

That was an absolutely pathetically awful, terrible, horrible, no good very bad game. There I said it. Wait, there’s more: ghastly, atrocious, hideous. Sorry I had to get it out of my system. Basically, there are not enough anti-superlatives in the dictionary to describe how poorly the Ducks played last night.

To sum up, it basically felt as if Legarrette Blount personally punched me in gut, continually, from about 7:15 to 10:30. I would have rather have been after game-punch recipient Byron Hout than a Duck fan at about 11:45 PM Mountain Daylight Time. Blount’s sucker punch made Carmello Anthony look like Muhammad Ali.

This game ranks on Bill Simmons’s “Levels of Losing” as combination of Dead Man Walking and the Full-Fledged Butt Kicking, with a twist of ruined season tossed in. In a vacuum, this game is already extremely painful, but to figure in our high expectations, along with the necessity to stay undefeated in the BCS hunt, this game clocks in right behind a cracked femur or childbirth on the pain scale.

The Bronco’s kept trying to give the Ducks a chance to get back in the game, but Oregon never capitalized. And that’s not an exaggeration. They didn’t even have a single first down until the 7:07 mark third quarter!

Simmons says it perfectly, “Especially disheartening because you wave the white flag mentally, but there’s a tiny part of you still holding out hope for a miraculous momentum change. … So you’ve given up, but you’re still getting hurt, if that makes sense.”Boise State kept rolling out long drives, completely wearing out the Ducks already shaky D, but not getting anything to show for it, keeping the faintest glimmer of hope alive in the back of my mind.

Similarly to the Purdue game last year, the Broncos sucked the life out of the Ducks but kept the door open by keeping it a 3- score game. And for the Ducks, when they’re offense is clicking, that margin can be made up in a matter of minutes. Difference was,  in the second half last year, Oregon capitalized on turnovers and kept inching their way closer, until finally tying the game and taking over momentum in the final minutes. The Ducks gained no such momentum this year.

Once Oregon got the ball after forcing a turnover, you could just tell that they were thinking, “I wonder how long before we screw up and give it back.” Or maybe that’s just what I was thinking. Whatever the case, it sure didn’t take very long.

Before I cry myself to sleep, again, I’ll you find the parallels between the Full-Fledged Butt Kicking and the pathetic attempt the Ducks made to play football last night. Go for it Simmons: “Sometimes you can tell right away when it isn’t your team’s day. … And that’s the worst part, not just the epiphany but everything that follows — every botched play; every turnover; every instance where someone on your team quits; every “deer in the headlights” look; every time an announcer says, “They can’t get anything going”; every shot of the opponents celebrating; every time you look at the score and think to yourself, “Well, if we score here and force a turnover, maybe we’ll get some momentum,” but you know it’s not going to happen, because you’re already 30 points down. … You just want it to end, and it won’t end. … But you can’t look away. … It’s the sports fan’s equivalent to a three-hour torture session.”

And there goes the season.

The UO Sports Dude

www.keithabecker.wordpress.com