Oregon Football: With Bryce Love Cleared to Play, Ducks Must Gameplan to Stop Him

In preparation for Oregon Football’s biggest and brightest (get it, it’s the first game under the lights) game of the year against the seventh ranked Stanford Cardinal, some pretty big news broke earlier today.

Per ESPN’s Joel Anderson, Stanford Head Coach David Shaw confirmed that star running back Bryce Love will be ready to go for Saturday’s game. He clearly has confidence in the Heisman candidate’s current football condition, as he boldly stated, “Bryce is great.” Oh is he? He’s great? I never knew. Well, he surely won’t be great after Troy Dye lays the hit-stick on him.

And speaking of Troy Dye, let’s talk about how in the world the Ducks can possibly stop him — because he’s a lightning bolt of a running back.

It starts and ends with the front seven, and more importantly: the defensive line. Now, if the Oregon defense can replicate Saturday’s stellar performance on the rushing front, then Oregon will win by 20+ points. If you’ll remember, San Jose State’s sloppy rush attack gained merely 29 yards on 28 carries. And one yard-per-carry doth not make a winning team. So, dear defensive line, please, can you please (sorry to be redundant) do the same thing as last week and knock this dude’s head off. Sincerely, Oregon faithful.

But seriously, the youngins on the line are more or less going to dictate the effectiveness. Sophomores Austin Faoliu and Jordon Scott half to get a push at the point of attack. I know the veteran, Jalen Jelks, can and will be able to disrupt one side of the line, but he’s simply one man. The Cardinal run-game can send Love the other way, towards the sophomores. If they get their tails kicked by the Stanford offensive line, then it will be a long long night for the Oregon defense. But if they can manufacture some chaos, and force Love to pull some of his herky-jerky jukes and crazy spin moves behind the line of scrimmage; the linebackers and blitzing defensive backs will have time to wrap up Love in the backfield and stop him before he gets out in the open field — where Bryce is lethal.

More from Autzen Zoo

• Oregon football: Ducks and Coach Prime playing it cordial leading up to Saturday
• Oregon Basketball: Non-conference slate features Michigan coming to Eugene
• Oregon football: Ducks find complete game effort in win vs Hawaii
• Oregon Ducks must get run game going against Hawaii
• 8 Pac-12 teams represented in Associated Press Top 25 after Week 2

Everyone knows Stanford’s offensive strong suit — for the past 4 or 5 years at least — has been their running game. A few years ago, it was Christian McCaffrey, victim of the biggest award theft since

Kramer vs. Kramer

won best picture over

Apocalypse Now

in 1979. That 2015 Heisman should be his. Derrick Henry wasn’t in the same stratosphere as C-Mac that year. But yeah, they had C-Mac for a few seasons and now have Love — the most dynamic back in the country. It’s uncanny, their recent running back success. That’s their m.o. They’ve got Love now and he’s a frickin stud.

The odd thing about this year is that they’ve had success despite a less-than-100% healthy Bryce Love. He left early in the USC game, but still had a very respectable 136 yards. He was then held out of the next week’s contest due to an undisclosed injury — which generally means he did something idiotic like break his wrist because he punched a wall after a video game. And in Stanford’s opener, Love rushed for a wildly uncharacteristic 29 yards on 18 carries. So, he hasn’t yet been the superstar of yester-year, but no one should be doubting him. I’m sure when he struts into Autzen, he’ll be ready to bulldoze his way to 200 rushing yards and 6 TDs. The question is: can we slow him down? I’m cautiously optimistic.

Oregon welcomes its first Pac-12 foe to Eugene, with kick off set for  8PM ET, 5PM PT on ABC.