Gut Reaction, Four Hours Later

Sometimes when defending a really nasty/mediocre/unimpressive/what have you victory, coaches will say "a win is a win." And indeed, today, that holds very true. We did, in fact, get a win, by virtue of scoring more points than Oregon State. And that will go down in our record as a win. Which looks pretty much like case closed.

Okay maybe not exactly. I guess the question is: how much should be be concerned about today's performance going into a game with a very good Oregon team next week? Seemingly gone is the defense that gave up fewer than 9 ppg in our first give games. Oregon, on the other hand, is very good at scoring points (except a 24-point blurgh-fest against UCLA). But I guess we should be concerned about Oregon next week, right now just thinking about what we saw today.

Bates said they would start to open up the playbook for Barkley, and if this is what an open playbook looks like, please close it. Lots of risky throws for Matthias, many of which didn't accomplish anything apart from giving me a slight coronary episode. We also saw him run some which, for someone whose team lost a game because of his shoulder injury, is not necessarily something I enjoy seeing. One point, though, is that I would actually like to defend that pick he threw in fourth quarter. I think we give Pete a lot of grief for slowing down considerably when a victory is in sight, producing lots of late three-and-outs. Throwing the ball that Barkley did is, presumably, the opposite of that. It just happened to be a pick.

If there's a silver lining to tonight's game, it's these:
a) Florida, Texas, and Iowa were playing at the same time, guaranteeing nobody outside of the PST were actually watching this. They will see a win and then sacrifice four goats to a shrine of Lou Holtz to signify our place in the AP poll or however that works.
b) How 'bout them Rojos??
c) Since Barkley came back from the shoulder injury, the offensive outputs have been 27 points, 30, 34, and now 42. At this pace (because this is obviously a linear relationship), we will score somewhere in the ballpark of 72 points in our bowl game.