It's NOT Just a Game.

The following was written on January 1, 2010.

First of all, I want to wish you all a Happy New Year. As we welcome in a new decade, I hope we make resolutions that are a little more potent on our minds than just the typical stuff (lose weight, read more, serve more, swear less, etc.).

As I’m writing this, I am somewhere on I-15 between Pasadena, CA and Las Vegas, NV. And I’m not happy. The Oregon Ducks – MY TEAM, my reason for even breathing the words Oregon and Ducks and even remotely liking the 10,000 combinations of green and yellow and white and black and now “graphite” - completely embarrassed themselves and the beloved Pac-10 in the 90-something-th Rose Bowl game. And I’m not happy.

I’d say that, since I’ve had some time to cool off, I’m more disappointed than anything. So as I sit here in the passenger seat of my parents mid-size Volvo, I can’t help but think about why I feel the way I do. A brief history: I can’t remember my first Duck game, but I know I was fairly young. And I can only assume that from that point, the Ducks were my favorite team. My dad and I would get season tickets every year since before I was 10. The only time I ever missed a game was if I was dead. I’ve done the face painting and the tailgating. I’ve been on DuckVision and snuck onto the sidelines. I woke up early (and still do) to catch ESPN’s College Gameday when it’s at Oregon. I stay up late to listen to every word analysts say. I read the Pac-10 blog more than I should and check out the football page on both goducks.com and registerguard.com daily. Needless to say, I have been an Oregon Ducks Football fan “yesterday, today, and forever.”

I remember getting into an argument with one of my roommates when I was at Brigham Young University. He was mad at me because I wasn’t a fan of BYU. All I could do was laugh at his seeming retardedness and say, “Because I’m a Duck fan.” I constantly remind my mother of the same thing. As my father-in-law so eloquently put it when speaking of his favorite baseball team, “I live and die with [the Red Sox].” So it is with me and my ducks. I love my ducks. Period.

That brings me to my point of venting a little bit in this post. The Ducks losing the biggest bowl game they’ve been in almost a decade has killed me over and over again – and it’s only been a couple of hours! I keep replaying the game in my mind and think to myself if only that thing or this thing could have gone differently. I get superstitious, too, and blame the loss on my daughter because she failed to wear her Oregon Duck game attire. I blame myself because maybe I could have yelled a little louder or not gone to the bathroom during the second quarter. I should have waited till halftime. If I wasn’t concerned with getting a good picture, maybe LaGarrette Blount wouldn’t have fumbled the ball. There’s a million reasons.

But I digress. The most disappointing thing of all is when you see a team perform below their ability. The Ducks are – rather, were – one of the premier teams in the country with an unstoppable offense. They got shut down because they failed to even try hard. “Holy Moly Jeremiah Masoli” looked like crap. His throwing abilities rivaled my wife’s and worse yet, he DIDN’T even try to run. Props to the defense though, they did a great job doing the best they could. But Oregon’s best defense is scoring 42 points a game. They only scored 17.

Ok, ok. I could keep going with excuses, but I’m not going too. The fact of the matter is, Chip’s boys didn’t want it as much as I did. They were outplayed by a mediocre-at-best Ohio State team. Even the OSU fans outnumbered Duck fans at least 2:1. That’s pretty sad. Everyone will praise OSU for finally winning a bowl game and Oregon will walk about wondering what could’ve been and with a 15 or 16 end-of-season ranking.

Bottom line is this: for me it’s NOT just a game. It’s a sense of pride and satisfaction. It means I can go to bed happy. It means this car ride would be a lot better. I would be excited to listen to Owl City. I wouldn’t worry about the McDonald’s I just ate making me fat. It means I would be happy. But now I have to think about what I’m going to tell all those BYU and Utah fans who say they beat the Pac-10. I have to come up with a “fun” way to tell my students what happened and act like it’s no big deal. That’s what I get for living in “enemy territory” and not amongst the other wearers of the green and yellow. And please don’t say, “there’s always next year,” because that’s a cop out. On the bright side, I don’t think I’ll have to wait another 15 years before going to the Rose Bowl again, but I think that next time, I’ll watch it from home.

I think I’m beginning to feel better.