they might have led the nation in SIW (self-inflicted wounds); they certainly had lots of those yesterday. You're going to get that with a young team though, and Cristobol needs to take a long look at his special teams coach I really expect Shough to be better next season, maybe by a lot. He's no Herbert though. here comes a laundry list of excuses adding to the disadvantage of having the youngest roster in league were several other significant factors: * The Ducks lost 15-16 starters to graduation and early opt-outs. Losing their entire starting OLine as well as the 4 years starting QB was huge. A college team almost never experiences that. They lost 4 starters from the defensive front-7 including the leader Troy Dye. And losing 3 of 4 defensive backs, including both safeties was a hole that was obvious all season long. Jevon Holland was an all-American level safety with CB skills, and Breeze an all-conference level safety who was a leader * The Ducks lost their top-5 tacklers from last season, and 6 or their top-7 tacklers. That's simply too much experience and talent to lose * a cancelled spring football season. Now, you could say that every team went thru that, and it would be true to a degree. But the Ducks started spring practices later than most other teams. IIRC, the Beavers actually had 4-5 more practices than the Ducks, and all the schools in California and Arizona came close to completing spring ball because of semester systems. * add no returning starters on the OLine, a new starting QB, a cancelled spring season, and a truncated training camp to having a new offensive coordinator with a new offensive system. That's a perfect storm of factors guaranteeing inconsistency. And it helps explain some of the confusion and blown assignments by the OLine this year. More that that, it tends to explain, in part, Shough's inconsistency in reading defenses and making the right decisions when running the offense now, stuff like this happens to teams like Alabama and Ohio State and they simply reload the roster and rotation and are back fighting for a national championship. That's what happens wehn you bring in top-5 to top-10 recruiting classes, year after year but the Ducks aren't there yet. This was Cristobol's 3rd season as head coach. Prior to his first season, the recruiting class was Taggart's. That class had 13 de-commitments when Taggart abandoned ship. Cristobol and staff were able to salvage that class, but it did drop from a top-5 class all the way down to 15. Cristobol has only had 2 recruiting cycles to get his type of players, and the level of talent in place. And one of those classes were true freshman this year the backbone of a good college football team is the depth, experience, consistency, and leadership that upper-classmen bring. Juniors and seniors. Players like Troy Dye, Drayton Carlberg, Brady Breeze, Jevon Holland, Justin Herbert, Penei Sewell, Jacob Breeland, and Juwan Johnson. The Ducks don't have much of that at all. Too many holes to plug. Iowa State had that kind of backbone and that advantage was really obvious yesterday
