Ducks hang 53 on USC..

LaMichael James rushed for 239 yards and three touchdowns, Darron Thomas threw three of his four scoring passes to Jeff Maehl and No. 1 Oregon roared back from a second-half deficit with a 53-32 victory over No. 24 Southern California on Saturday night.

Thomas passed for 288 yards and Maehl had eight catches for a career-high 145 yards for the high-powered Ducks (8-0, 4-0 Pac-10)

http://www.cbssports.com/collegefootball/gametracker/recap/NCAAF_20101030_OR@USC

This game was played in LA, in a game that was billed as USC's bowl game. Didn't matter.

If Oregon isn't the #1 team in the country, just who is?

:wtf:

... their D remains a bit leaky.

But they score so many so quickly, it hasn't mattered. I figure they've got two potentially tough games left....Arizona and OSU. Personally, I think they'll beat Arizona rather easily seeing as how it's in Eugene, but the Civil War game you never know what's going to happen..

And, yeah, having UA at home is big, especially now that the weather has turned.

And they give up far fewer than Auburn does, while scoring a whole lot more than Auburn.

Hmmmmm.

Oregon Turns Practice Into Nonstop Sprint With Precision as Goal

Oregon began pulling away from Tennessee in the middle of the third quarter last month, a Volunteers defensive end approached Ducks center Jordan Holmes with a plea. “If you guys run two more plays at this speed,” Holmes recalled him saying, “I’m going to fall over dead.”

The tongue-wagging Tennessee lineman stayed upright, but Oregon never stopped. The Ducks scored 35 straight second-half points on the way to a 48-13 victory in Knoxville. The win showcased Coach Chip Kelly’s innovative no-huddle spread offense, which has averaged nearly a point per minute — 57.7 per game — thanks to a frenetic tempo that might represent the next offensive revolution in college football.

From Dennis Dixon to Jeremiah Masoli to Darron Thomas to a half-dozen pinch-hitting quarterbacks in between, the Ducks’ offense has not slowed since Kelly arrived in Eugene as the offensive coordinator four seasons ago. No. 4 Oregon hosts No. 9 Stanford on Saturday in a highly anticipated game that raises this question: Why do Kelly’s schemes allow just about any quarterback to lead the Ducks to the top of college football’s statistical categories?

The answer comes from the blur that is an Oregon practice, a kaleidoscope of colors, whistles and music. The practices are so intense that even team managers have to tape their ankles, and they illustrate the white-knuckle philosophy of a program designed to leave opponents in its wake.

“The tempo is unique,” said the former N.F.L. coach Jon Gruden, who nearly took a job at Oregon to learn Kelly’s offense. “They’re not the only no-huddle, but they’re as fast as any team that plays football.”

Other programs pride themselves on tempo, but Gruden said he had never seen an operation that was both this fast and this refined. Oregon’s practices last two hours, an hour less than a typical college practice, and there is so little time between plays that coaches must do their teaching with only a few words or wait until the film room. Kelly said that practice had become so sophisticated and fluid that getting off 30 snaps in a 10-minute period had become common.

That relentless pace and superior conditioning help explain how Oregon has outscored its opponents, 86-7, in the second half this season without ever running that staple of football conditioning drudgery — wind sprints.

“Practice is a wind sprint,” said Nate Costa, Oregon’s backup quarterback. “There’s no real need to do that additionally.”

More: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/02/sports/ncaafootball/02oregon.html

If the Ducks can hold on past Arizona, and win in Corvallis, they deserve to go to Glendale.

Go Ducks!

Syd