1. 13-0: The first Ducks team to ever do it. The first Big Ten team to ever beat Michigan State, Michigan, Ohio State and Penn State in the same season. The only team in the nation to go undefeated, and the unanimous #1 team in the country for the last six weeks. It’s all pretty damn cool. The crazy thing about it is that we left week 1 and week 2 questioning just about everything. We went into two of the toughest road environments in the conference and won. We again went undefeated at Autzen, which truly felt like Glory Days Autzen every Saturday. After winning Big 10 Offensive Player of the Year,Dillon Gabriel got his Heisman invitation this week, marking back-to-back Oregon QB’s in New York. Culminated everything with a Big Ten championship where our defense played likely its worst game of the season, but the offense was as dialed as we’ve seen. I think back to Dana Altman’s phrase, “ Sometimes you, sometimes me, always us”. We talked last season after UW about winning the moments in the biggest games, and behind Gabriel, we did that. As far as the big picture goes, we’ve given ourselves a nice long rest and I’m looking forward to watching the 1st round games, specifically this Tennessee vs Ohio State matchup.  Best of all, the Rose Bowl is waiting, a mecca for many, but specifically tons of  Duck fans like me. See y’all in Pasadena.

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2. Offensive Game Notes: 

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• LOVED the play-calling and plan by Stein (for the most part). I really liked how we ran right at their DEs, specifically Carter, on the first few drives. We clearly identified a matchup advantage with Tez in the middle of the field, and Gabriel was surgical in the pocket as usual. We rarely threw the ball outside the numbers, taking our advantage between the hashes and Stein struck a really nice run/pass balance. Good to see us have success scoring TDs in the red zone, and running the ball efficiently down the field. 

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• It was great seeing Marcus Harper back, but I thought he was understandably rusty. From my untrained eye, he had a few big whiffs in the run game, and I thought Dave Iuli generally outplayed him throughout the game. We’ll see what things look like in Pasadena.