Pac-12 Championship: Oregon 49, UCLA 31.
Of all the absurd statistics that come with an incineration like this — in a championship game, no less — the most absurd of all that it was basically an average effort for the Ducks. Forty-nine points tied for their sixth-highest total of the year, right behind the 53 they scored against Stanford. It was their eighth time over 500 yards total offense (573), and nowhere near the 670 they put up last week against Oregon State. Seventh time over 300 yards rushing. They average over 500 yards and 46 points. The 18-point final margin was barely halfway to the 31-point spread.
LaMichael James, likely playing for the last time in Autzen Stadium, racked up 244 total yards on 27 touches, his best game since… well, since October.
So this time it was "only" UCLA, a lame-duck outfit that backed its way into a de facto division title despite a 50-0 thrashing in its last game and had such little faith in its own prospects in Eugene that it went ahead and fired its head coach on Monday. It could have been anyone in the Pac-12 on the other end of the Ducks' fluorescent buzzsaw, and at some point over the past three years, it has been. Since Chip Kelly was promoted to head coach in 2009, Oregon is 26-2 in conference games, by an average margin of three touchdowns per game. Its third consecutive, outright conference title matches Oregon's entire championship haul over the previous 89 years combined.
[ Related: Check out photos of Pac-12 championship game ]
Under the circumstances, a return ticket to the Rose Bowl seems a lot less like the just-happy-to-be-here bonus that it was two years than ago than a birthright for the reigning kings of the conference. The one peak the Ducks have yet to scale under Kelly is a BCS bowl win, courtesy of back-to-back defeats at the hands of Ohio State and Auburn. Oregon hasn't won a Rose Bowl since 1916, the longest drought in the conference. Now that they've offered another sacrificial lamb to appease the new normal, the Ducks' next step forward comes with finally converting winning big into winning the big one.
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Matt Hinton is on Facebook and Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.
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