Matt Prehm's tears taste so good

bananasnblondes said:

This is the clown who runs the Oregon 247 site and is domehow more unprofessional than the LPT

In sports, there is always going to be a winner, and there is always going to be a loser. What makes college football so awesome and yet so damn gut-wrenching at the same time is the brutality of how thin that line between a winner and a loser can be. Friday night in Las Vegas, we saw for a heartbreaking second time this season how thin it really was.

The Oregon Ducks 2023 football season will go down as one of just four years where the Ducks won 11 games in the regular season. It's an accomplishment that should be celebrated. The 2023 season will also be remembered as a what-if year that feels unfairly wasted. Playoff runs are so hard to get to, and this year's Oregon football program was as close to punching their ticket to the playoffs as one could get, and yet they felt nowhere near it at the same time late Friday night in Las Vegas.

Bitter rival Washington beat the Ducks for a second time this season, and for a second year in a row, they knocked the Ducks out of the college football playoffs. The Huskies will go on to the playoffs as the only 13-0 team in Pac-12 history, pouring more salt into Oregon's wounds Friday night.

Oregon didn't play its best football Friday night, and it cost them. It was shocking to see an Oregon defense that was so good against the run all year long get pushed around. It was shocking to see an Oregon football program that's prided itself all year on being the most physical team on the field, get dominated by the physicality of the Huskies.

Friday night, Oregon's program and fanbase walked out of the stadium in the desert, shellshocked at what just happened. The playoffs are gone. Bo Nix and the Heisman, are gone. Winning the Pac-12's final championship is gone.

Gone. Gone. Gone. All in a blink of an eye. Months of hard work and sacrifice made by old and young players have just gone. Life sometimes just isn't fair. Oregon's story was good, and the players who made up the people within the program were even better. But sometimes, the Hollywood story doesn't ever happen.

But what makes this even harder to swallow and get past is the unknown of when the Ducks could field a team like this again. This year in college football, a handful of teams could win a national title, and the Ducks were undoubtedly one of those teams. There hasn't been that dominant program that's blown everyone out all season. This year felt like as good of a chance as ever for the Ducks to get back to the playoffs and win.

Now, they're eliminated when the finish line is within reach.

"It was just a shocking end," said Oregon QB Bo Nix. "It's tough when you're so used to go, go, go, go, go. When it ends, it just happens very quickly."

In 60 minutes time in the dark of Las Vegas, Oregon's special and historic season was tossed like a pair of dice at the craps table. Seven came up, and Oregon's season was collected up and taken from the Ducks.

Now, the Ducks are left with the difficult task of picking up the pieces. Finding a way to salvage this once special season. A bowl game will be announced on Sunday. The Ducks are likely headed to the desert of Phoenix to play in the Fiesta Bowl against a really good opponent. Oregon will have to figure out what players will play in the bowl game, who will transfer out as the portal opens Monday, and who decides to sit out the bowl game to prepare for the NFL Draft.

Bo Nix will certainly be one of those players who will have to decide on playing or not. He said his mind hadn't been made up, but he sure sounded like someone who likely won't play. And that's okay. Nix has given Oregon so much to the program, and playing in a bowl game not included in the playoffs feels like too big of a risk for Nix's NFL Future. At least, that's what I'd advise him if I were in his corner.

"I have no idea. I'm looking forward to whatever bowl game that is chosen for us," said Nix. "I'm just trying to get over that loss. I'm not really thinking about anything after today."

The accomplishments can still be made by Oregon this season. The Ducks have only won 12 or more games in a season five times. The 2023 version of Oregon football could become the sixth team in program history to do it. A win in the Fiesta Bowl could capture some of the lost momentum from Friday night and jumpstart the program as it heads into a new era of college football with its move to the Big 10 next year.

"We have high expectations for ourselves. There's nobody outside of this room that wants us to do better than those guys in that locker room, these coaches," said head coach Dan Lanning. "They know what we had this year. We have a special group this year. But it's a building block, right? We're in year two. This is an opportunity to build on to this and set the expectations for what it should look like in the future. And we've got an opportunity to go play in a really good bowl game, right, and cap this thing off the right way."