By Gus "Walk-Off" Fields
Eighty-four to nothing. Read it twice — it doesn't get less lopsided the second time.
Oregon buried Portland State on Friday night in a rout so complete it barely qualifies as a football game in the usual sense. And the Ducks did it missing two players who'd normally be in the middle of everything: top wide receiver Jeremiah McClellan and starting tight end Jamari Johnson, both held out with injuries, according to ESPN.
That's the detail that ought to worry the rest of the Ducks' schedule more than the scoreboard does. A team doesn't need its top target or its top tight end to hang 84 points on somebody — it just needs depth, and Oregon showed it has plenty. Whoever stepped into those vacated snaps did enough damage that the absences barely registered on the stat sheet.
For Portland State, there's no spin to offer. A shutout loss of this size is the kind that follows a program around for a while, fair or not. But blowouts like this one say as much about the winner as the loser, and what it says about Oregon is that the machine runs fine with backups in the gears.
No word yet on the severity of the McClellan and Johnson injuries or when either will be back. That's the follow-up worth watching — because a Ducks team this deep, fully healthy, is the one everybody else on the schedule should be worried about.
Final score's the last thing that mattered here.
— Compiled from reporting by ESPN.
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