Ritchie: Oregon-UW Rivalry Always at Fever Pitch

The start of November has brought a new feeling to the Oregon football season.

This resurgence couldn’t have come at a better time, as the Ducks enter the toughest section of their schedule against Washington, Washington State, Utah, and Oregon State.

According to Vegas, all of those teams (plus Arizona State) are the most likely teams to challenge Oregon for the conference title.

Add in the extra emotion and intensity of rivalry games, the intimidating venue at Utah, and tendency of Washington State to play Oregon tough even in down years, it becomes clear it won’t be easy for the Ducks to win out.

Especially with the spotlight of their high ranking.

Ignore for a moment Lake’s confusion of nouns, adjectives and adverbs, and the glaring irony of that mishmash in a conversation of academic bona fides. More importantly, Is he right?

At this point, we should note that while we are lifelong Duck fans, the younger of us (Eli) has a graduate degree from UW in a highly ranked program, and enjoyed his time as a student in Seattle. It is an excellent university.

But that doesn’t change the fact Lake doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

If you look up some of the measurements that could define the academic rankings of the two schools for undergrads, like incoming GPA, acceptance rate, graduation rate, and graduate salaries, Washington is typically a little better than Oregon.

But Washington is no Stanford or Notre Dame by any metric, and even these large averages lose much of their meaning when considering football players on full academic scholarships don’t compete for places in the same way as traditional students.

Schools get a point for a student athlete returning to school, and a point for the student being eligible. That number is divided by the total available points, and multiplied by a thousand.

So Washington football kept all its players in school, and kept them eligible, at a level of 99.9%. That’s admirable. Oregon kept ALMOST all its players in school and eligible, for nearly 97%, also pretty admirable.

Secondly, UW and Oregon battle for recruits all the time. Just this year, Oregon has flipped multiple former Washington commits.

Washington fans also won’t react well to touting academics during a frustrating season, especially for a rival who has dominated the matchup in recent history. This isn’t a great look with the recruits.

This is quite understandable, though, in a rivalry that was dominated by one team (UW) for decades, only to completely flip the other way (UO) in the past nearly three decades.

And what other rivalry has “The Pick,” “The Point,” and “The Streak?”

In 1994, Oregon’s Kenny Wheaton pulled in “The Pick” at the Oregon goal line, with the Huskies about to score and secure the last minute victory.

Instead, Wheaton took it all the way back for a touchdown, a remarkable turn of events made famous by Jerry Allen’s call of “Kenny Wheaton’s going to score!”

During the years of complete Oregon dominance, UW head coaches Tyrone Willingham and Steve Sarkisan went 0-4 and 0-5, respectively, and even Chris Petersen endured a 2-4 record after the streak ended.

The Huskies and their fans suffered mightily until 2016, when they took out all the pent-up rage on the Ducks in a 70-21 win and reveled in “The Point.”

Will this year’s game produce another historic moment, perhaps “The Catch” or “The Tackle,” or even “The Kick Return” where a UW player lies down in the end zone to set up a trick kickoff return?

Oh wait, that last one already happened in 2019 and turned into “The Penalty.”

Whatever happens probably won’t compare to the 1962 battle in Seattle. The Huskies led 21-13 late in the fourth quarter, but the Ducks mounted a drive behind the passing of Bob Berry and the running of Mel Renfro.

Other accounts at the time said that Hill was “tackled” by the Washington fans. So maybe there was “The Tackle,” though without video evidence.

Just imagine if something like that were to happen on Saturday. SportsCenter would show endless replays, and Twitter would likely explode with commentary.

Aren’t rivalries great?

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