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.  

Ifo Bomaye and I begin the pod with recapping the loss to UCLA out in Pasadena. We talk about what we can expect from the offense and we have pretty different opinions of where the unit is headed. I talk about the play-calling but really think that the calls indicate something that runs much deeper on offense. There are a couple pitfalls we can have the rest of the season. One of the problems I brought up on the pod is that the defensive side of the ball could resent the offensive side of the ball. They get stuck on the field a lot and lock down the opponents until things fall apart in the fourth, when games are pretty well out of hand. All the pressure is on the defense to make things work, and with little help from the offense, some bitterness could arise. Going into the Utah game I think we have a bad matchup. The “Sack Lake City” defensive line could pose major problems for a quarterback with a 15% sack rate. If Oregon couldn’t get enough points to win against the worst rushing defense in the country, they’re not going to get it done against a slightly above average unit. Ifo Bomaye gives a few reasons why I’m wrong. We finish talking about the upcoming basketball season. I briefly start discussing the new SI article that largely goes after the school administration. We move on to discussing the new recruits that Altman has brought into the program, the opening couple weeks of the season, and what we can expect to see from the team, at least for the first couple months.

Ifo Bomaye and I are back after quite the weekend in college football. A lot of top-25 teams went down and there were fewer undefeated teams than there were the week prior. The PAC-12 results only lead to more questions now that we are over halfway into the season. How does Cal go from giving up 40 points to an Oregon team that was with a backup quarterback for three quarters of the game to shutting down an offense that had made good defenses look below average? USC beat Utah but then washington drops their game against Arizona State. How did the Sun Devils hold washington to only 7 points while Oregon scored over 30 at full strength?

Throughout this podcast both of us sound pretty negative at times. But we are actually pretty optimistic about the rest of the season.  We move on to recapping the game against Washington State. The strides that the defense has made have been nothing short of astonishing. Leavitt is getting paid a lot by the athletic department but he has certainly earned it so far. Troy Dye has been an absolute force in the middle of the field. Springs and Jelks have also caught the attention of Pro Football Focus. Ultimately, we have a true freshman quarterback who looked like a true freshman quarterback against one of the better defenses in the conference. He made some freshman mistakes and struggled at times but I think he’ll have a much better second game after simply having a start under his belt. The offense made it harder, especially the line by not getting much of a push on first down or on the fourth down tries. Washington State did a good job of making late shifts and stunts on the defensive line that were effective in causing confusion. Ifo Bomaye and I have a long conversation near the end of the podcast addressing the trend of fans leaving early from Duck games. We’re pretty understanding of the situation with night games and we do not believe in fan-shaming. This also leads into a short discussion about selling alcohol at college sporting events, which we disagree on. Lastly, we look to the upcoming weekend of football. There are a lot of games with double-digit spreads but will be pretty telling about the teams involved. Oklahoma plays Texas, West Virginia plays Texas Tech, and with San Jose State at Hawai’i capping off the night.

News broke yesterday (at the time of the recording) about four schools, apparel companies, and players, that are involved in bribery and other possible financial crimes. Ifo Bomaye and I talk about the implications of what the investigation means, the role of bag men, and what it could mean for Oregon. Obviously, we move on to the Arizona State game, which was not chill. Arizona State exposed a lot of the weaknesses that Oregon had. The Sun Devils’ identity was a bad matchup on paper, especially when there was a clear lack of execution by Oregon. I feel that the team was unprepared in a lot of ways. However, there is a lot of praise for how the coaches adjusted in the game, especially on the defensive side of the ball. Ifo Bomaye and I discussed some of the weaknesses last week but we go over them again and how Oregon can fix those this next week. We finish discussing Cal and how they are exceeding expectations this year. Cal looks like how I thought Oregon State would do this year. They have rough first halves followed by great second halves. Their quarterback is turnover prone and their defense ranks near the bottom of the country in terms of defensive efficiency, but they are a challenging team that will certainly give the Ducks more of a run for their money than the Vegas point spread indicates.

Ifo Bomaye and I are back after taking a week off. Due to my travel schedule I didn’t have the opportunity to get on a skype call. Luckily, (or unfortunately) we saw some of the same themes across both the Wyoming and the Nebraska game. We both agree that the issue is on the offense but we have different opinions of what that can be. I mention a few things I see on the offensive line and Ifo goes more into the play calling. The segment is wrapped up with a talk about the players that stand out to us, the positives and negatives so far, and what we hope to see in the next few games.