Dammit, Stanford.

Oregon’s post-WW2 record vs Stanford is competitive, with the Ducks holding a 30-27 edge in the series since 1945.

But the record doesn’t show that time and again, the CardIndianals have shot an arrow/sprung a sharpened tree branch into the hearts of Duck fans - either ruining the chances for a bowl bid or otherwise destroying the hopes for a season.  And, strangely, it doesn’t seem work the other way nearly as often.

By my reckoning, there have been eight nine instances since WWII that Stanford has, in one fashion or another, ruined Oregon’s season… and three times Oregon has returned the favor.

• 1954 – Oregon is ranked #16 in the AP poll and has an eye on a Rose Bowl bid. With future #1 pick George Shaw at QB, the senior-laden Webfoots are seen as ten-point favorites to knock off Stanford in Multnomah Stadium. But versatile fullback Jasper McGee broke a rib in practice and missed the game; Shaw pulled a thigh muscle in the opening victory over Idaho and wasn’t 100%. Stanford, the only team coached by high-tops, was led by future NFL stalwart John Brodie. The Indians scored quickly, took advantage of three Duck fumbles, and held on for an 18-13 win despite being outgained almost 2-1 by Oregon.
  The game was marred by numerous penalties for unsportsmanlike conduct on both teams, and after the final gun a battle royal erupted on the field, with Stanford players engaging Oregon partisans from the stands, resulting in a trip to the hoosegow for one of the visitors. Ducks fell out of the Top 20 the next week and wouldn’t return for two years, finishing the season at 6-4.
• 1964 – Len Casanova’s best team came into the Stanford game 6-0 and ranked #7 in the AP poll. They hadn’t lost since the previous November 2^nd. Never mind that the gaudy record had been earned against teams with an aggregate record of 12-20-3; Eugene was gripped with Rose Bowl fever, and the three upcoming games were seen as mere tune-ups before a Civil War that would decide the conference title. Stanford was 2-4, had just lost to #2 Notre Dame 28-6, had lost seven straight to the Webfoots, and hadn’t won a road game in two years.

  Statistically the game was a blowout – for Stanford. The Tribe outgained Oregon 374-73, had a 21-5 edge in first downs and ran off 78 plays to Oregon’s 45. But Stanford’s drives kept stalling in the red zone; they missed three field goals, allowing Oregon to keep it close. Oregon led late in the 4^th quarter, but a short punt from horrible field position gave Stanford the ball on Oregon’s 39 with 54 seconds left. As they’d done all day, the Oregon DBs failed to cover their men; Stanford’s Dave Lewis found HB Bob Blunt streaking down the sidelines, giving them a first down at the Oregon 12. Two plays later, Stanford K Brad Beck’s final attempt was true, giving the Indians an improbably 10-8 victory.
  It’s hard to say with certainty that an Oregon win would have put the Ducks in the ‘65 Rose Bowl regardless of what happened in the Civil War. What can’t be disputed is that the Stanford loss made a CW win absolutely essential for a return trip to Pasadena… and of course that didn’t happen.

• 1972 – A rare Oregon upset of a good Stanford team. The 1-5 Ducks, in Dick Enright’s first and penultimate season, hosted the #13 “Cardinals.” 17 point underdogs to 4-1 Stanford, the Ducks, who had given up over 2,000 yards rushing over its last six games, held their guests to 25 rushing yards, led 15-0 at halftime with the help of an 85 yard run by Donnie Reynolds, and held on for a 15-13 victory. The two-time Rose Bowl champions, sporting a new, less-racially-insensitive nickname and mascot, never recovered from the humiliation, going just 2-5 in conference.
• 1976 – Oregon was on a five-game losing streak, and had been outscored 151-39 including the last game, a 0-46 pasting at UCLA. Don Read needed a win over Stanford to keep his job. The stats were there; Oregon outgained the Cardinal, 425-265, and forced 10 punts. But Jack Henderson threw four interceptions, leading to 21 Stanford points, and the team couldn’t crawl out of its self-created hole. Played before a crowd very generously estimated at 18,000 in Autzen, Read’s final home game was a 28-17 loss. It was a testimony to the state of the sport in Eugene that nobody really cared. Read was fired a week later.
• 1987 – Oregon was 4-2 in Bill Musgrave’s freshman year, and although some of the bloom came off the Rose the previous week (a 41-10 loss to UCLA, where Oregon lost its first national ranking in 16 seasons), the ‘87 campaign could still have lead somewhere. Their upcoming opponents, other than ASU, were mired in losing seasons. This included Stanford, at 2-4. If the Ducks could get to 8-3, they’d see that first bowl bid since 1963. And, again, the stats were solidly on their side – outgaining the Cardinal 332-185, controlling the clock.
  But as usual, Oregon killed itself against the Tree, with four turnovers – three in Stanford’s red zone. And when Brad Muster scored from the three yard line with 39 seconds left, giving the home team a 13-10 victory, you could hear the air coming out of Oregon’s season all the way from Palo Alto. The Ducks managed wins over lowly Wazzu and OSU to finish at 6-5, but there would be no bowl in 1987.
• 1989 – On the Farm again, and another heartbreaking loss. Oregon was 2-0 and coming off a shocking 44-6 victory at Iowa. Stanford was 0-2, on a seven game losing streak, and had just lost to Oregon State for only the third time in twenty years. Feeling their oats, Duck fans bought up shirts that said “RESPECT – DEMAND IT!” Unfortunately, respect must be earned … and this year Oregon didn’t earn any from the Cardinal, blowing a 17 point fourth quarter lead and losing on a last-second field goal, 18-17. At least this loss didn’t keep Oregon out of post-season play, but the then-unproven-as-a-bowl-team Ducks might have looked much more attractive to games other than the Independence Bowl at 9-2 than they did at 8-3.
• 1993 – One of the most snake-bitten teams in Oregon history still had an outside chance at a bowl bid, but only if it could get past Stanford and OSU in its last two games. It couldn’t. Stanford came into Autzen, ran out to a 22 point lead and held on for a 38-34 upset victory behind QB Steve Stenstrom, who lit up the beleaguered Oregon secondary for 407 yards, leading to boos and catcalls from the home fans, and more calls for Rich Brooks to be replaced.
• 1995 – There was no way to know this at the time, but the late September upset of the #12 Ducks , 28-21, in Autzen by Ty Willingham’s Stanford team kept Oregon from repeating as conference champions. The Ducks only lost one other conference game in 1995 (to ASU); if they’d beaten Stanford, they would have been 7-1 and jumped over USC and Washington in the league standings. (Yes, the same would be true if they’d beaten ASU. Sue me.)
• 2001 — An upset loss at Autzen to the Cardinal keeps Oregon out of the national championship game.
• 2010 — #4 Oregon gives #9 Stanford its only loss of the season, 52-31.
• 2011 — #7 Oregon gives #4 Stanford its only loss of the regular season, 53-30.
• 2012 — #18 Stanford returns the favor from the past two seasons, giving Oregon its first regular season loss in overtime and derailing the Ducks’ national championship hopes.

Now that’s a rivalry.

November 9, 1940 – Oregon 18, UCLA 0

We’re back! Miss us?  We missed you too.

Click here for a new entry in The Program Project:  the 1940 UCLA game at Hayward Field.

The "first" Oregon football game?

This post is about Game Zero.

The first official Oregon football game is documented as having played out on a muddy field during a drizzly day in March of 1894.

But the first game played involving Oregon students is said to have taken place years earlier, sometime between 1888 and 1892, on a meadow north of Skinner’s Butte. It was described in the October 1929 issue of Old Oregon by one of the participants, Frederic S. Dunn, class of 1892, and later a professor of literature at Oregon. The article is a tongue-in-cheek plea to have the game’s participants declared the first Oregon football lettermen, although the author can’t recall any other specific players in the game.

The plea, sadly, fell on deaf ears; but Dunn deserves an honorable mention for his colorful prose.

… For, be it known to you, my unknown confreres, the publicity now first accorded this story through the courtesy of OLD OREGON will clinch the claim we undoubtedly have to be recognized as the earliest wearers of the O . My own personal insistence upon this phase may in some measure account for the previous failure of the event to get into print. I have volunteered to repeat the story to several interviewers, who seem thereafter to have confused their notes with some of their mental-test quizzes . Their indifference toward this bit of archaeological information has been most regrettable…

Think of it, my hoped-for confederates. If we can put this over, when next Homecoming Day recurs, you and I can boldly walk down the cinder path, taking precedence even over Frank Matthews and Doc Keene in the march of the “immortals,” for our event antedates by several years that much chronicled so-called “first Football Game” in the mud.

These, then, are the generations of the first athletic contest ever participated in by students of the University of Oregon. Its recounting takes us back into times now almost impossible to visualize, when lonely Deady, the University’s only Hall, loomed up like a haunted Norman stronghold out of acres of wilderness. The present delightful maze of trees and shrubbery was not yet a transplanted probability. The vast Campus square was enclosed by a white-washed board fence, with one entrance; a style of four or five steps right at the end of Twelfth Avenue.

Like a moat on the outside of that fence was eocene mud, which, however, in season was of the proper consistency to foster about our only athletic possibilities; leapfrog, the broad jump and half hammond. (I never have known the origin of this latter word. To enlighten our modern gymnasts who may never have indulged in this primal sport, it was a “hop, step, and jump.”) The mud was awfully nice to measure one’s length in and you could toe your mark in it so much more legibly than in your modern sawdust.

Since the University provided no schedule of student activities such as now keep the campus in anticipation of coming attractions, about the only diversion we boys had, aside from playing Duck-on-the-Rock at street intersections, was to make a daily pilgrimage of afternoons to watch the south-bound Roseburg Express come in. There was an uninterrupted view of the track clear to Blair Crossing, and when, sometimes after weary minutes of delay – for not even then was the Southern Pacific always on time – we heard a far-away whistle and caught the first glimpse of the engine with its wide-flaring smoke-stack emerge from the woods and round the bend on its eastward swing into Eugene, there would be an almost concerted shout of “Here she comes.”

The mail-sacks would be dumped into a push-cart, trundled off down the street, and we boys would break up into desultory groups, to congregate again at what was then our Post Office, on the corner of Ninth and Willamette, where the First National Bank now stands. Here we would “pass the time of day” while waiting for the mail to be distributed and then would come the tedious falling-in-line for our turn at the window.

Meanwhile, somewhere in the later ’80s, there had arrived in town a new, up-to-date grocery firm, Smith and Hall, from New York State. The latter’s son is still a substantial business-man of Eugene. Carl Smith, the son of the former and now a distinguished Judge in Hawaii, was fresh from an eastern law school. His rather assertive and somewhat aquiline face was held in corresponding respect by us of still-primitive Oregon. And to us, late one afternoon, as we were gathered on the Post Office corner, came said Carl Smith and displayed to our wondering sight the first foot-ball of modern type most of us had seen. We had previously known only the spherical kind, something like the basket-ball of today, and such we used to kick about on vacant lots in a free-for-all knock out. But here now, in Carl’s arms, was the real thing, an ovate pig-skin foot-ball.

We were not long in deciding to adjourn to the space back of Skinners Butte, where there were no Municipal Auto Camp or Gravel Plant at that time — just a great open meadow between the river and the wood on the north slope of the hill. And here we nominated two captains who in turn selected their men, naming them alternately in the good old choose-up style. How in kingdom come I got in on the deal, I do not know, for I was a thinnish sort of chap and never considered much of a husky. But, would you believe it, I was booked as quarter-back, and told off to guard the east goal, down toward the river-bridge. I had no idea what my title meant – in fact, as I walked away from the bunch, I was inclined to interpret it as a sort of slight. There were “fullbacks,” and “half-backs,” and here I was a yet smaller fraction. And goal? I saw nothing of that semblance. And so, while they were still discussing, I sat down on a moss-covered rock and waited for developments. Anyway, I was prepared to make a great kick if that ball ever came my way. There never entered my head the possibility of a punt which I might gather in. I most certainly would have kicked and very probably would have waited for the ball to bound before essaying that kick.

What were the other fellows doing up there in the middle of the field? It was the funniest foot-ball game I had ever seen. Every time the ball was put in play, there would be a long pause, to find out what next to do. Both teams would all gather round Carl Smith and he would expound the law to them out of his manual of rules. And from where I sat on my lichened rock, I could hear much dispute and often loud words. The warm afternoon sped on. Nothing happened to distract my attention. The discussing became a sort of monotonous drone to me. I felt drowsy and nearly tumbled off my rock. So I played mumbley-peg for a while.

Finally, as it was nearing supper-time, I shouted that “if they were not going to give me a chance at that ball, I was going home.” So, off I meandered down Pearl Street. If a touch-down was afterwards made through my having abandoned my post, I do not know. I never even inquired. And as Carl left for the east in a few days and took his precious pig-skin with him, nothing more about foot-ball was broached. I graduated in June of 1892 without any farther experimental knowledge of the game, and was quite unprepared for the shock i met with at Harvard in the fall of that same year, where foot-ball was the Tsar of sports and the games with Yale and Princeton and Pennsy were climacteric occasions.

I am confounded by my own failure to recall a single other participant in that scrimmage behind the Butte. Judge Potter was probably not there. He was not athletically inclined, if I remember his student days and, besides, he was wearing a silky beard which fell almost to his waistline. Ed Orton may have been in the fray. He was be-whiskered too, but i do not think he would have counted it an alibi. Darwin Yoran, our Hon. ex-Mayor and now our Hon. Postmaster, could have been there. His long legs were admirably adapted to end runs. And Clyde Patterson – were you there, Clyde? So long absent from Eugene, but lately returned to the scene of your former escapades: maker of skiffs to ply our stumpful Mill Race, rider of a bicycle whose front wheel had the hub-spokes, felloes, and tire of a farmer’s truck-wagon, such that, when you started down Eleventh Avenue on the loose board walks, we knew it was you and not a typhoon – into all sorts of scrapes and out just as soon – you surely could not have missed that game back of Skinner’s. And Herbert Condon, now indispensable Comptroller of the University of Washington, owner of a similar wheel but painted a different hue – were you delivering Morning Oregonians that afternoon on your real flesh-and-blond pony – the pony on whose back you used to stand when lighting our old-fashioned kerosene streetlamps – or did you yield to temptation and ditch your bundle of papers under a sidewalk until you had played the game?

Well, this is much like speaking through a microphone. I hope someone will hear my appeal. So, boys, now all together! – WE WANT OUR O.

— excerpted from “And Here’s Another One”, Old Oregon v11-7, April 1929. Public domain.

October 17, 1931 – USC 53, Oregon 0: The Joe Lillard Story

Look. See that mirage? There he is, on page three of the 1931 USC program. “Happy” Joe Lillard, he’s tagged. He’s on the roster, there’s a posed action shot, but when game time rolled around he wasn’t on the field. The short version: Lillard, a halfback recruited by Oregon head coach Doc Spears at Minnesota who followed Spears to Oregon in 1930, had been declared ineligible by the Pacific Coast Conference earlier in the week. He had been accused of playing semi-pro baseball, in violation of conference regulations. Without his star player, Doc’s team had about as much chance of success against Howard Jones’ eventual national championship USC team as Joe Lillard had of making it as a black player in the white football world of the Thirties.

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1972: How to hire the wrong coach, by committee

On February 3, 1972, the sporting world learned that Dick Enright, 37, an Oregon assistant coach with just two years of college experience under the recently departed Jerry Frei, had been named head coach. Enright signed a one-year contract for $22,500 — state regulations only allowed University contract employees to be hired on annual contracts, but UO Athletic Director Norv Ritchey assured Enright, and the public, that Enright had a “four year commitment.” Thus ended one of the more bizarre “searches” in the long history of college football at Oregon.

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