Pac-12 Championship Game: Oregon Will Give Rick Neuheisel an Ugly Exit from UCLA

Rick Neuheisel's swan song as the head football coach at UCLA will sound more like a quagmire of quacks, and not just because his Bruins are facing the Oregon Ducks in the inaugural Pac-12 Championship Game.

There's no doubt the Bruins will play their guts out at Autzen Stadium on Friday night. Neuheisel may not be a good coach when it comes to, you know, wins and losses, but his players love him and will do their best to send him off from his alma mater on a high note.

The problem is, the Bruins stink. It would be one thing to say that the Ducks' talent is far superior at just about every position (which it is).

It's another to add on that Oregon is a far-better-coached football team than UCLA is, which is largely a function of Chip Kelly's superior skills as a sideline strategist, locker-room tactician and all-around football genius.

Neuheisel, meanwhile, seems to think that charm and likability is enough to coax a bunch of 18- to 22-year-olds into winning football games.

And even that wasn't enough to get the Bruins up for their big rivalry game against USC last weekend. They got shut out, 50-0, against the actual Pac-12 South champions, their new uniforms making them look appropriately like a white flag waving its way across the field at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.

As difficult a matchup as that was for UCLA, Oregon figures to give the Bruins an even tougher time, especially with a Rose Bowl berth on the line. The Ducks sport the sort of incredible team speed across the board to give UCLA fits on both sides of the ball.

Not to mention an offensive system, led by Darron Thomas, De'Anthony Thomas and LaMichael James, that maximizes every ounce of pace the Ducks have in their happy feet.

These two teams met in Eugene last season in a game that saw Oregon win by 47 points and more than double up UCLA's yardage total, 582 to 290.

Unless Slick Rick can sneak his way into the action at quarterback in place of Kevin Prince, expect that trend to continue, thereby giving Oregon its third consecutive conference championship along with a trip to Pasadena.

And the satisfaction of knowing it was the last team to humiliate Neuheisel, a man who tormented the Ducks during his days at Washington.