Let’s flash back to the first half of last year’s Alamo Bowl. Oregon was rolling over TCU in Texas, Vernon Adams was dealing, and the consensus on Twitter was that the Ducks may have been in the Playoffs had Adams not been injured early in the season.
We all know what happened next. In short, the second half of the Alamo Bowl is a black cloud that has officially snuffed out the off-season hype machine around the program. The Ducks have rarely been mentioned as a Playoff darkhorse the past eight months and have been picked to win the conference by pretty much no one despite being either first or second conference each season for the past 10 years.