Another Saturday gone, another Saturday we learned some things. The Pac-12 can be so fickle with what happens on any given Saturday afternoon or evening. After seeing who beat who yesterday, here are a few observations about how all this may shape out.
Let's start with UCLA, for as much as they have struggled this year, they are sitting in second place in the Pac-12 South division at 7-2 and just beat the upstart Arizona Wildcats 17-7. The defense finally showed what people at the beginning of the season thought that they could do. They shut down an Arizona offense that had been putting up some big numbers on the scoreboard and on the stat sheet. Brett Hundley also totaled 320 yards in this game. He had 189 in the air, 131 rushing and when your quarterback does that, your team will have a lot of success as well. However, it was the defense that won this game for the Bruins. Even Head Coach Jim Mora thoughts so, "Today, was the first game that I felt defensively like we did what we were supposed to do on every play." Being in second place is not a bad place to be right now, especially if things play out to where they might win the division because of their win over ASU. Anything can happen.
Onto Oregon. Clearly, to me Oregon is the class of the whole conference. Right now, they are putting points on the board just like people are accustomed to. They are playing with a lot of confidence on both sides of the ball. Oh, and the one thing that other Pac-12 teams don't have. Marcus Mariotta. The Duck quarterback is playing extremely well. He is throwing the ball well and he is also running through defenses with his amazing speed. To me, he is the deciding factor for the Ducks. He threw for 258 yards and two touchdowns and also ran for another two touchdowns. The 45-16 victory over Stanford got that monkey off his back and now he is looking confidently to the rest of the season. "To get this win was huge. It will build a lot of momentum heading into the rest of the year." Mariotta stated after the game. Look out Pac-12, the Ducks are starting to quack pretty loud right now.
Let's go down to Arizona State. This version of the Devils are pretty good. I'm not ready to say that they are great yet. Being in attendance at their victory last night against Utah I was encouraged to see the up tempo going for them in the first half, but they could only muster six points out of it in the first quarter and were only up by a touchdown at half. They had held Utah running back in check, but that changed in the second half. The up tempo was gone, Utah was getting more pressure on Taylor Kelly and Booker was running for 146 yards in the game. The play calling was questionable for the Devils as well, but in the end they had the stat that matters. They had the win. They need to clean up some things on offense if they want to hang with a team like Oregon.
All in all, it was a good weekend for the Pac-12. Oregon is the team that probably gets into the playoff. The south division is still open to possibilities as to who wins it. It's November, so anything is possible and with rivalry games happening during this month, that "anything" aspect will or can come into play. Here's to more chaos happening.
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