The Oregon Ducks flew down to Palo Alto on the heels of a big home loss to Washington State, a game in which the offense was only able to muster 10 points. This was easily explained by the injury to their starting QB Justin Herbert, and the emergency insertion as starter of true freshman Braxton Burmeister.

Also missing from the arsenal against the Cougars were two of their top playmakers, Dillon Mitchell and Charles Nelson. Fortunately for Burmeister in his second start, his top two WR’s would be returning to the starting lineup down on The Farm.

In the end it didn’t matter as the Cardinal rolled to a resounding 49-7 home win.

Against Stanford, the Ducks shut down their passing game a minute into the second quarter after Burmeister’s second interception, revealing that execution through the air would be completely untrustworthy. Once that happened it seemed the Cardinal had 11 men in the box.

Burmeister finished the game 3-8 for 23 yards passing, with the two INT’s.

“Early in the game (Burmeister) turned the ball over and we can’t turn the ball over if we were going to beat this football team,” said head coach Willie Taggart. “He had two turnovers and I think he was shook a little bit. He came to the sideline to try to get his confidence back.”

In the face of this, the Ducks turned to the running game which was good, but with the Cardinal defense stacked against it, not good enough by itself.

“We knew going in we could run the football so we tried to play to our strength,” said Taggart.

Royce Freeman continued to set all sorts of records. His 18 carries for 143 yards moved him past USC’s Marcus Allen into fourth place on the Pac-12’s all-time rushing list. Another 100+ yard game will move him past Ken Simonton into third.

The Ducks’ four running backs: Freeman, Kani Benoit, Tony Brooks-James and Darrian Felix, averaged 7.6 yards per carry.

Not to be outdone, Stanford’s dynamo RB Bryce Love went 17-147 and two TD’s before sitting the rest of the game with a tweaked ankle.

“We knew we were going up a really good back and that we had to gang tackle in order to stop him,” said Taggart. “We didn’t do a good job of that in the first quarter.”

Normally it would have been enough to lose the game to have a -1 turnover ratio and a blocked punt for touchdown against you.

But with the running games basically even (Oregon 276 yards, Stanford 248), the passing games were anything but. The Cardinal was 21-28 for 256 yards and four touchdowns through the air, the Ducks 5-13 for 33 yards and no touchdowns.

“It is the stuff that we work on every single day,” said wide receiver Charles Nelson. “We just have to go out and execute and today we didn’t do that.”

The Oregon coaching staff obviously expected better execution out of the quarterback position.

“If I saw it in practice he wouldn’t be in the game playing,” said Taggart of Burmeister’s inconsistency. “He had a good week of practice. He came out and didn’t have the game that he wanted to.”

And with Justin Herbert out for several more weeks, the Oregon passing game is going to need to start playing like they practice. Or it will be a long road to the Civil War game.