Hindsight, as Foresight
In hindsight, Oregon even with a healthy Dixon was fated to lose again sometime, and better now than the BCS title game. Teams that give up scores like 27 to Houston, 21 to Fresno State, 31 to Stanford and 34 to Washington don’t win national titles. Surely someone saw this coming.
Oh that’s right, we did. In a September 27th article we identified several teams as “Defensive Pretenders”. We called out the teams in two different categories, “Frauds” and “Bubble” teams. The teams called out as “Frauds” included -
California
Oregon
Kentucky
Missouri
Nebraska
All were undefeated but Nebraska, in which case it was pointed out that USC’s win wasn’t particularly impressive due to the suspect nature of the Husker’s D.
Called out as “Bubble” frauds were –
Boston College
Hawaii
Texas
Wisconsin
And yes, Florida.
All were undefeated at the time.
We did miss the boat on one - USC. Despite its two losses, the USC defense is the real deal and they shouldn't have even been on our bubble, though we did point out they might well improve.
Defense truly does win championships. At the time of the article, we noted LSU and Oklahoma as potential championship level defenses.
That may just be our BCS title game.
Mentioned in Austin Murphy's book 
2 comments:
I seem to remember a Cal fan dropping by to say that Cal's defense can't be judged by yardage allowed since it's a "bend but don't break" scheme.
But they have given up more than 30 (the magic number) 4 times this season. Plus two additional games where they gave up 28 and 27.
No, Cal's defense breaks all the time.
Hopefully Kentucky's O, can score enough this weekend and next, and get us to Atlanta. Going back & checking things is one thing I like about blogs and something you'd never see from espn.
It's not 100% though, because OSU is #1 in total defense. Kansas is #2. We'll see how they fare when they get their toughest tests.
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