Tag: Oregon

Stanford vs Oregon Preview: Game Of The Year

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Stanford-vs-Oregon1by Jerry Feitelberg

Well fans, this is the game of the year in not only the Pac-12 north division but the entire Pac-12 and , perhaps, the nation.

Stanford will be playing the the high-flying Oregon Ducks on Thursday November 7th at Stanford Stadium at 6pm The Ducks are ranked #2 nationally with a 8-0 record. Stanford has a record is 7-1 i and is ranked at # 5. The game is sold out but there may be some single seats available

Oregon will be looking to avenge the 17-14 loss they suffered to the Cardinal last year at Autzen Stadium in Eugene. The Ducks never lose at home but they did last year and Stanford, not Oregon, went to the Rose Bowl. The Ducks are loaded again. They are led by first year head coach Mark Helrich. Chip Kelly,who built Oregon into a national powerhouse, fled to the NFL and is in the process of rebuilding the Philadelphia Eagle franchise. Helrich has the Ducks playing at an extremely high level again this year. Oregon has scored 34 points or more in 34 consecutive games. The lone exception was the loss to Stanford last year. Handling the chores at quarterback is Marcus Mariota, who is a sophomore. Mariota has been named a semi-finalist for the Maxwell Club’s Award for Collegiate Player of the year. Mariota runs an offense that is second nationally in scoring and in total offense averaging 632 yards per game. That, folks, is absolutely off the charts. Mariota also has completed sixty-four percent of his passes.

The Stanford defense will be sorely tested. Defensive end Ben Gardner has been sidelined for the rest of the season with an arm injury. Stanford’s strength on defense has been the pass rush. Stanford ranks third nationally with 27 sacks and Gardner was second on the team with 4.5 sacks behind Trent Murphy’s 9.5. Murphy, by the way, was named Pac-12 Defensive Player of the Week. In the game against Oregon State, Murphy recorded 3.5 tackles for loss, 2.5 sacks. Logged 8 tackles, 2 quarterback hurries and blocked an extra point. It was the second times this season that Murphy has won the award.

It should be interesting to see how Stanford’s great defense, albeit riddled with injury, can stand up to the offensive onslaught that will be coming there way on November 7th. The Cardinal shut down Oregon State’s Shawn Mannion last week and limited OSU to just 12 points. The Cardinal offense is going to have to get their game going in order to beat the Ducks.

While Gardner is lost for the year, the Cardinal has Senior Henry Anderson returning from injury and Anderson will be at defensive end for the Cardinal.

There is no doubt about it. This should be one of the great games of the year. The winner may be in the BCS championship game. The eyes of the nation will be watching for sure.

No. 8-ranked Cardinal hold off Oregon State

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By Daniel Dullum

No. 8-ranked Stanford traveled to Corvallis, Ore., to face Oregon State, holding off a late Beavers scare to emerge with a 20-12 Pac-12 football victory.

Tyler Gaffney carried the ball 22 times for 145 yards and all three Cardinal touchdowns on runs of 4, 9 and 32 yards. Stanford improved to 7-1 overall, 5-1 in the conference, while OSU slipped to 6-2 overall, 4-1 Pac-12.

Cardinal quarterback Kevin Hogan completed 8 of 18 passes for 88 yards, as Stanford totaled just 276 yards on offense. At the same time, the Cardinal defense held the Beavers to 288 total yards, well below the OSU season average of 515 yards per game.

Beavers quarterback Sean Mannion, who leads the nation in passing yards and touchdown passes, completed 41 of 57 for 271 yards and one TD.

Stanford held a 20-9 lead with less than four minutes left in the fourth quarter. After Trevor Romaine booted a 39-yard field goal with 3:57 to pull the Beavers to within 20-12, OSU drove to the Cardinal 7 with 30 seconds remaining. Four straight incompletions ended the drive, and the Beavers’ six-game winning streak.

The Cardinal defense stopped the Beavers on downs four times inside the Stanford 35 yard line, and sacked Mannion eight times.

Earlier, Romaine gave OSU a 3-0 lead in the second quarter with a career-long 50-yard field goal.

Next week, the Cardinal return home to host No. 2 Oregon.

Michael Duca on Cal football

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by Michael Duca
BERKELEY–I had a chance to work with Cal Bears radio play by play man Joe Starkey at the Rose Bowl when the Bears played against UCLA last Sat Oct 12th. I had a chance to show him around my childhood press box except I didn’t recognize much of the press box today. It’s named after a living person it’s always dangerous to name a building after a living person because their not yet done with establishing their reputation.
Joe and I had delightful time discussing how Cal has been thoroughly dismantled in the first half of the season as they get ready to go into the game with Oregon State this Saturday with a record of 1-5 and their only win came at home back on September 7th against Portland State. They’ve been dismantled in the first half and their trying to figure out what they might try to do to try to respond to UCLA in the second half.
These guys that do the Cal Bears radio network are pros nobody has ever done a more shameless call in the history of college football than Joe Starkey when he called the famous lateral plays that led the Bears to a famous comeback over Stanford and Joe was yelling “the band is on the field” over and over when the Bears scored for a touchdown. The call was so well known and it’s pretty amazing to know an icon.
Starkey has done a lot in his time and he even passed down the line to his son who is a highly respected statistician the two or three best people in the country at doing talent stats providing statistical information to broadcasters on the air while their doing their work and it’s a job I do occasionally. It’s not easy to learn someone else’s rhythm and timing and figure out what they anticipate what they want to know before they know it so you could have it ready.
Team roughing it out and getting ready for Oregon State: It seems to me that Cal played better against Oregon than against Oregon State in the last decade and a half but that could be faulty on that part. Oregon State will be forever locked in my mind as the team that came out of nowhere to deny Cal the number one spot in the rankings by scoring three touchdowns on them late in the game.
This Cal team is in transition, they had issues with their defense before the season began it was very young and very inexperienced and now they are still very young and very inexperienced and very injured. Five starters are out of the line up for various amounts of time all the way up to forever. It’s very difficult they can move the ball very well although they had issues last week against UCLA.
On the other hand you can see elements of what they are capable of doing from time to time, right now they haven’t solved their number one tailback, the don’t have the running game, they count on managing the control block and as a net result what their doing is running what seems like 1000 plays a game but it’s really about 100 but it feels like 1000. Your putting the ball in the air 40-50 times a game and your leaving yourself to the possibility of having bad things happening and more scores will go lopsided and not in Cal’s favor.
Michael Duca covers Cal Bears football for Sportstalk Radio