Joel Klatt: College football media has ‘tendency to lose sight’ of Oregon

When Kirk Herbstreit said in September that it feels like no one is talking about Oregon this year, he was early to a narrative that would circle back around. The Ducks had just dismantled Oklahoma State 69-3, looked dominant in every facet, and still couldn’t get anyone’s attention.

“It’s like they’re taking the year off. People need to remember that they’re playing ball up there in Eugene,” Herbstreit said during the Michigan-Oklahoma broadcast on Sept. 6.

Herbstreit’s comments felt prescient then. They seem even more relevant now.

Because according to Joel Klatt, that tendency to overlook the Ducks hasn’t gone anywhere. Even as they’ve navigated one of college football’s most treacherous November schedules, even as they’ve stacked wins in hostile environments, the national conversation keeps drifting elsewhere. Oregon is 10-1 with a win over Penn State — which Klatt noted was four individual plays away from a 9-2 season — in its back pocket. The Ducks have handled Iowa in Kinnick Stadium, steamrolled Minnesota, and just dispatched USC 42-27 on Saturday.

And yet here we are, still talking about whether people are paying attention.

“Excellent performance from Dan Lanning and the Ducks,” Klatt said on his eponymous podcast after the USC win. “This is a really legit team that I know has that loss to Indiana. And I think because of their location and where they’re at, there is a tendency, if we’re really being honest with ourselves in the college football media sphere — and I try not to do this — there’s a tendency to lose sight of the Ducks. There really is.”

“Oregon just continues to play well and they continue to get quality performances from their quarterback, Dante Moore,” Klatt continued. “They get Kenyon Sadiq back — he was a monster in this game at tight end. They can run the ball with a really talented stable of backs. They’re good on the offensive line. They’re really good on the defensive line. That defense has played better and better and better as the season has gone on. And I think that they learned from their loss to Indiana. They’ve protected their quarterback a lot better and their resume looks really good. This was always going to be an incredibly tough November and they still have a giant really tough rivalry against Washington next week.”

Klatt also made the case for where Oregon should land in this week’s College Football Playoff rankings. The Ducks had already jumped Ole Miss in the AP Poll following their latest win, and Klatt expects the committee to follow suit.

“I think Oregon should easily be the six seed, maybe higher,” Klatt argued. “I expect them to jump Ole Miss in the CFP this week. They jumped them in the AP Poll already, I think correctly so. Will they also jump Texas Tech? I’m not sure. I think that they probably should.”

And yet the conversation keeps circling back to what Oregon hasn’t done, or what they still need to prove, rather than what they’ve accomplished. It’s the same dynamic Klatt identified back in early September when he called Oregon “a legitimate national title contender” that nobody was talking about. The Ducks were built exactly like the Michigan and Ohio State teams that won championships the previous two years, he said then. That assessment looks even better now, three months later, after Oregon has survived the gauntlet everyone warned them about.

The reality is that Oregon has done everything asked of them since the Indiana loss. And they’ll need to continue doing so to clinch a first-round home playoff game, whether the media loses sight of them or not.