Living and Dying with the Civil War.

David R.

November 28, 2010 - 9:30 PM

After 11 weeks of a grueling football season that began in September, the Oregon Ducks are now one victory away from receiving a birth the BCS National Championship game in Glendale, Arizona. As it always is, the regular season finale is the Civil War game against Oregon State and this year it is in Corvallis.

Given that UO and OSU are only 40 miles apart, the rivalry of the Civil War match up is strong enough that the record of both teams competing is relatively irrelevant. The Ducks and Beavers want nothing more to stomp one another to establish state-wide bragging rights for one more year. Considering that the Ducks are still the best team in the nation, College Game Day announced that it will be making its way to Corvallis to cover the action that will make or break Oregon's season.

My biggest concern for this year's Civil War is the revenge factor for the Beavers. This game already has enough riding on it, not to mention that for the last two years Oregon has beat the Beavers in this game, consequently preventing them from playing in the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. Now that the Ducks have the chance to make it to the pinnacle of college football, one would assume that the Beavers would love nothing more than to ruin Oregon's national title hopes on the last weekend of the season.

I was lucky enough to get a ticket to the game, so I will be there cheering as loud as physically possible, knowing that a victory will send our boys to the promised land. The crowd is sure to be hostile, but Reser Stadium is rather weak and it won't present anything that the Ducks didn't see in Knoxville against the Tennessee Volunteers. There is absolutely no way that the Beavers have a better football team than we do. We just have to play with the same fire and intensity that we have for the last 11 games and everything else will fall into place. Oregon has been dominant the entire season, and the team should continue that trend this weekend.

Yesterday I spent my day at the Rose Garden in Portland watching the Oregon men's basketball take on number one ranked Duke. The game went as you would expect, as Oregon lost by 30. Duke favorite Kyle Singler put up 30 points and the Blue Devils showed why they are the best team in the land. Regardless, the Ducks put up an impressive fight, scoring over 70 points in a game that no one expected them to win. It might as well have been an away game for the Ducks because the Oregon fans were severely out numbered (I'd say the fan base was 70% Duke fans). It was still fun to work a game in front of a packed crowd in a professional arena. The Ducks have hit a bit of a skid here early in the season, but hopefully they can rebound, literally and figuratively, when they return to Mac Court this Thursday night to take on the Tigers from Missouri.