EUGENE, Ore. — Hang with Oregon coach Chip Kelly a bit and you notice he does everything fast. He talks fast. (He’s from Nuh Hamshuh.) He builds programs fast. (The Ducks reached last season’s BCS title game in his second year as head coach.) They play fast. (“There’s too much standing around in football to begin with,” he says.) More than anything, his teams score fast.
If you watch Oregon play Colorado on Saturday afternoon, don’t even think about a bathroom break. If you do choose to leave your seat, you’ll likely miss two touchdowns. You might get lucky, though. A Buffs defensive player may fake an injury by collapsing as if hit by a sniper.
But that doesn’t happen as much as it used to. Last year, a Cal defensive coach got suspended a game for ordering the trick. Besides, Oregon doesn’t seem to mind.
“Hey, let’s get some water also,” quarterback Darron Thomas says.
What you’ll see at Folsom Field is the latest in college football’s offensive evolution. Oregon runs a hyper-fast, no-huddle, zone-read option attack that forces opponents to cover sideline to sideline and adjust on the fly.
The ninth-ranked Ducks (5-1, 3-0 Pac-12) are third nationally in scoring (48.7 points), up slightly from last season’s 47-point average, which led the nation. But with Oregon, it’s not how much. It’s how fast.
Oregon has scored 38 offensive touchdowns this season, one every 3 minutes, 54 seconds that it has had the ball. Want more proof that time of possession is as worthless a stat as free-throw defense? Opponents this year have held the ball much longer — an average of 35:18 to 24:42. Oregon is last in the country.
“But we run the same number of plays,” Kelly says. “The only concept of that is that team is better at standing around than we are.”
The only glimmer of hope of the Buffaloes surviving a humiliation akin to playing naked is this: Oregon’s best two offensive threats are hurt. Thomas (knee) and running back LaMichael James (elbow), the nation’s leading rusher, might sit out.
Oregon, a 30 1/2-point favorite, doesn’t miss much of a beat with backup quarterback Bryan Bennett and tailbacks Kenjon Barner and De’Anthony Thomas subbing for James.
“They’re like a six-headed snake instead of a two-headed snake,” said Arizona interim coach Tim Kish, who, as defensive coordinator, watched Oregon rip his Wildcats a month ago, 56-31. “They’ve got so much talent across the board. What they do is not exceptionally complicated. It’s just that they execute so well.”
Said Colorado coach Jon Embree: “The thing that jumps up about them is their speed. They have great speed at all their skill positions. They do a tremendous job of making you defend the whole field, vertically and horizontally.”
It all goes back to Kelly. He’s as New England as maple syrup, with a slight twinge of an accent and with occasional reminiscences about that big New Hampshire-Maine football rivalry.
But, while first playing at New Hampshire and later serving as its offensive coordinator, he found something to hate more than the Maine Black Bears: wasted time. Today, Oregon’s practices last less than two hours. Meetings are never more than 30 minutes.
“You can say, ‘Hey, we practice for 2 1/2 hours,’ ” Kelly says. “Well, you stood around for 45 minutes of it. We try to do everything fast, everything hard and finish everything. There is no wasted time. It’s an efficient operation.
“Sometimes coaches want to hear themselves talk too much.”
However, the Oregon no-huddle offense is a little more complicated than it might seem. First, Darron Thomas must read sideline signs ranging from Shaquille O’Neal to — and we’re not making this up — a fat beaver, which indicate the formation and the play.
Second, after the snap, Thomas must read the defense and sometimes decide whether to option pitch, run or throw.
The offense is designed to get the speedy Ducks in space one-on-one with a defender who, after defending plays every 13 seconds or so, wouldn’t be able to keep up with the Theta Chi intramural team.
Oregon outscored its opponents in the second half a year ago 285-83.
“We play at a tempo we practice at,” Kelly says. “If a byproduct of that is a team we play isn’t in as good shape as they should be, obviously that works. But we don’t go into a game saying we’re going to wear them down. We just play.”
At the controls are two football scholars in Darron Thomas and Bennett. Thomas, a reluctant quarterback convert at Houston’s Aldine High, had a tremendous senior year and committed to Louisiana State — until coach Les Miles wouldn’t fully commit to him as a quarterback. So, Thomas came to Oregon and buried himself in the film room.
“If you don’t study, you’re going to get blown away,” Thomas says. “When you study, it starts to be basic, starts to be repetitive. A play-action fake is the same thing as a running play. It’s the same fake, same look, same style.”
Bennett, meanwhile, is a red- shirt freshman with 4.52 speed. He was a sprinter and triple jumper for Crespi Carmelite High in Encino, Calif. After leading the Ducks to two second-half touchdowns and two field goals last Saturday, Thomas could’ve gone on a hike in Boulder had he wanted to.
Oregon’s only two losses the past two seasons have been to Auburn and Louisiana State, two physical SEC defenses with speed to match Oregon’s. Colorado has neither the speed nor the size. So come and watch the show.
Just hold off on the fluids.
