While Week 2 of the college football season was filled with drama, the typical chaos, and the game of the year with Texas-Ohio State, the most shocking result of the weekend was Oklahoma State’s upset win over the Oregon Ducks.
This preseason, most analysts expected the Ducks to be one of the top few teams in the country. Oregon was once again a playoff team in 2025, with their only losses coming to eventual National Champion Indiana. They had another typically excellent recruiting class, with four five-star high schoolers joining an already loaded roster.
Quarterback Dante Moore surprisingly returned for another season, and while head coach Dan Lanning had to replace two coordinators, expectations were that the transition would be seamless thanks to picking internal promotions.
Through two games however, no team has been more disappointing. Oregon struggled to put away Boise State in Eugene in week one, ultimately winning 34-27. Week two was far worse.
Several turnovers forced by the Ducks’ defense papered over what was a dominant performance by the Cowboys. Oklahoma State ran a whopping 83 plays for 554 yards, a solid 6.7 yards per play. They averaged nearly six yards per carry on the ground, good for 237 total rushing yards.
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Meanwhile, Oregon could never get much going offensively. The Ducks’ vaunted offensive line was frequently overwhelmed, leading to an anemic 3 yards per carry and just 281 total yards with 4.8 yards per play. Sometimes upsets are fluky, with some pivotal breaks going the underdogs’ way. Not this time. The Cowboys dominated and deserved to win. If anything, the ultimate final margin was misleadingly close.
Beyond the shock of a team that had lost 12 straight games, that lost to Tulsa in week one, dominating an opponent that had national championship aspirations, it raised several questions. Namely, how the heck did this happen? And according to a postgame report out of OK State, the Cowboys might have had some help from the Ducks themselves.
“We were noticing earlier in the week that their (Oregon’s) offensive line had tendencies that helped us key into run (or) pass and a couple areas we could take advantage of,” said linebacker Tate Romney. “and obviously our defensive line was keyed into that. That was one big thing that gave us a big advantage.”
Well then. That’s interesting, isn’t it? It’s like in baseball, when a pitcher tips his pitches and lets hitters know what’s coming.
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That might not have been all their telegraphing either. Landon Tengwall on his show this week added to what Andrew Nemec found on quarterback Dante Moore.
Essentially, Moore against Oklahoma State had two different stances in his pre-snap setup, using the same configuration before runs, and then a different configuration against the pass.
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It’s not clear whether the Cowboys were aware of that “tell” too, or if it was just the offensive and defensive line movement that tipped them off. But it presents an interesting possibility: is Oregon’s poor performance due, at least partially, to giving the defense free clues as to what’s coming?
Maybe. But it’s always easy to point to these types of things when you’re losing. And even if they were telegraphing their plays, individual Oklahoma State players would still have to win their battles against their matchups. You can know a pass is coming, but if your defensive line is overmatched, there’s no guarantee you get to the quarterback. Not to mention that the Cowboys offense moved the ball seemingly at will against Oregon’s defense. And nobody’s said anything about the Ducks “play tipping” their coverages and blitzes.
Oregon plays Portland State this coming weekend, so any “corrections,” or lack thereof, won’t matter given the massive talent gap. But with a massive game against the now No. 12 USC Trojans at the Coliseum looming on Sept. 26, Lanning and the rest of the coaching staff will be combing the tape to fix their predictability.
