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Oregon Ducks @ Oregon State Beavers Football Recap

Oregon 37, Oregon State 20

The Oregon Ducks are headed for the national championship game of college football this season not just because they defeated the Oregon State Beavers in the rivalry game known as the Civil War, but because they have the coach with the most courage in the United States of America… at least when it comes to gameday decision-making in the heat of battle.

Yes, in the crucible of crunch-time competition, there’s no bolder chess player than one Chip Kelly, the former offensive coordinator and position coach at New Hampshire who emerged from obscurity as the offensive coordinator at Oregon in 2007. Hired by former UO coach Mike Bellotti to direct the Ducks’ offense, Kelly was given the keys to the kingdom in 2009 when Bellotti briefly moved to the athletic director’s office. Kelly’s 2009 Oregon team suffered an embarrassing season-opening loss to Boise State and endured the fallout of the LeGarrette Blount sucker punch against a Boise State linebacker, but ever since that moment, Kelly’s made nary a misstep in Eugene. He led the Ducks to one Pac-10 championship last year, and as his team entered Reser Stadium in Corvallis this past weekend for a date with the upset-minded Beavers, Kelly already owned another Pac-10 crown. The only question was if he was going to add a national title-game appearance on top of it.

He did, and in typical Kelly style.

One element of in-game college football jujitsu that becomes regularly ignored and underplayed is that good coaching is about more than teaching or even play selection itself. The simple decision to be aggressive is what often separates great coaches from the average ones in this sport. You might have great Xs and Os or a clever way of speaking to players, but the foremost building block of success is to make fundamentally sound choices.

Setting a tone with your decisions often does a lot more to fire up your players than any stemwinding pep talk. Kelly coaches to dismantle opponents and declare, without any subtlety, that he’s on the sideline to take no prisoners. That’s what his fake punt – from his own 28-yard line, on fourth-and-three, with a tenuous nine-point lead – achieved in the third quarter. Yes, Oregon – leading by a mere 16-7 score – was not in full control of the game but was easily subduing Oregon State’s defense. It is safe to say that 99 percent of America’s FBS coaches would have punted in that situation. Not Kelly. The fake punt gained a first down and led to a touchdown that delivered a 23-7 lead to the Ducks… not to mention full-fledged control of the latest Civil War.

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Oregon State coach Mike Riley, meanwhile, kicked two field goals inside the Oregon 10 when he was trailing by at least 13 points in the second half. One kick came when OSU trailed 23-7, the next one when the Beavers trailed 23-10 and still needed two touchdowns to pull ahead of the Ducks, who weren’t done scoring for the day. Against Oregon’s offense, kicking red-zone field goals might as well be a concession of defeat. The Ducks weren’t marvelous in this game, but they still powered past their opponent in the final 20 minutes of regulation, a pattern that’s characterized so many of their games this year. Auburn is a much better team than Oregon State, but let’s hold the Oregon-Auburn stories that will be written over the next few weeks. Saturday afternoon in the Pacific Northwest, the story was that Oregon has brought the Pac-10 Conference back to the BCS National Championship Game. Why? Because Chip Kelly coaches the Oregon Ducks, and no one else does.

By Matt Zemek
DFN Sports Senior Staff Writer