Duck fan posted this below. And you want to know what this is based on? It's based on the fact the Ducks play both Mich and Washington in 2024, and those were the two best teams ***in 2023.****
TEE also said Oregon's 2024 schedule is stronger than USC's 2024 schedule. Those two schedules are currently available for review online btw.
Is there anyone on this board, or on this planet who thinks a strength of schedule is based on what your opponents did the previous season? For example, is Washington and Michigan going to be as good in 2024 as they were in 2023? Husky fans, please help us out. The Huskies were the 2nd best team in the nation for the 2023 season (TEE acknowledges this). So does that mean Washington will be the second best team in cfb in 2024? Will Washington even be ranked in the top 25 in 2024? And will Mich be the best team in the nation in 2024? If you believe this, then any betting website will give you phenomenal odds on either team winning it all in 2024.
Allow me to chime in here while bathing in the glowing rays of schadenfreude (more on that in a sec, since my buddy mandb brought it up specifically).
College football in 2024 is significantly different than it was when, say, USC last won a national championship in 2004 or even when Oregon last played for a national championship in 2014. With NIL and the transfer portal, it's much more likely that a team from the year prior may have no resemblance to the team that will be for the coming year.
As such, strength of schedules based on last year's results probably shouldn't hold the weight they did a decade or two ago. So just because Oregon plays Michigan and Washington a year after both duking it out for the national championship, it doesn't mean those schools necessarily resemble what they were from the year before.
Losing your head coach, along with a ton of your players to the NFL and to the portal, appears to have been catastrophic for both Washington and Michigan. I therefore do not consider them tough teams to play in 2024. And I personally don't feel Oregon has a particularly difficult schedule in 2024.
We miss the unarguably toughest of the other 3 ex-p12 teams in USC, don't play Penn State, play tOSU at Autzen, and no real challenging OOC games (BSU at Autzen?....no...) Only other tough game after tOSU is probably at Wisconsin in mid November.
That said, allow me to address SCHADENFREUDE in terms of Oregon's fans and Washington's not so greatly exaggerated demise. Has there EVER been a situation in college football that has gone from rags to riches back to rags again than the UW Huskies, I ask you?
A once-proud program goes 0-12 in 2008, only to emerge from the ashes in 2023 undefeated at 13-0 and play for the national championship game. And then to faceplant in said national championship game, and shortly after have its vaunted head coach summarily up and leave for another school after only two glorious years for UW, torching the ground beneath him as he scampers off? All-the-while looking for a nerve-wracking moment like it's Oregon's head coach who is leaving for that other school only to have Oregon's coach shut that rumor down more emphatically than any other college football coach has ever done in the history of the NCAA?
Does SCHADENFREUDE (the same schadenfreude that Huskies themselves gleefully basked in during the failed attempts by Oregon in 2011 and 2015 of winning a national championship?) get ANY better than that? I ask you.
So I think we quackers can be forgiven....at least this one time.
TL;DR version: In my opinion Oregon doesn't appear to have an overly-tough schedule in 2024, and no shame in a little shadenfreude courtesy of your biggest rival due to a most unusual set of circumstances.
RAH! 😎
After the 2022 season, when the news came out that many of the key players were coming back for 2023, it didn't take much research to come to the conclusion the the 2024 would be a shell of a team compared to 2023. Even if the coaching staff didn't turn over.
Top 25? I don't know. There hasn't even been a practice to report on yet.
TEE just moves the goalposts too much and LA I just simply ignore now when all he has is Schadenfreude. Not much you can take for a discussion with that...
All we have to go by is how they did last year.
That said. Anyone who
Thinks their schedule is tougher than USCs needs to add state Penn. Notre dame. Michigan. Wisconsin Washington and lsu to theirs. In addition to ucla and wherever else usc has. And take a hard look. Likely the toughest schedule in usc history