Killing the cat

What we have here, Adam, is a classic Schrödinger’s cat situation.

As we both know, the dream is dead. Dixon is out for the season along with his top three backups and half of our opening-day depth chart. Stewart, with no other credible threat to divide the attention, is a sitting Duck, and an increasingly gimpy one too. Jaison Williams can’t catch. BCS bloggers are writing disdainful one-liners (and not much more) about Oregon’s “one-trick-pony offense” and predictable collapse. On and on the litany goes.

This is the awful truth — except…

…the two of us haven’t talked since ASU. I’ve tried to call a few times. I’ve composed messages in my head only to have the situation change (that is, worsen) before I could send them along. The last time we actually talked, though, the Ducks were up to #2 and just needed to ride the 51% odds to play for the national championship.

And so it hasn’t all happened yet, not completely, not in a quantum mechanical sense. The Ducks’ season is the cat in the box, laying in a fluctuating state of dead/alive from radioactive isotopes, waiting for us to officially take a peak to send the whole debacle crashing down.

This sense was heightened the other day by a malfunction in my cell phone. It played me a “new” message: my old archenemy Adam wandering the Autzen parking lot in the wake of the USC game, crowds whooping behind him, finally giving up on finding a specific tailgate amid so much celebration and euphoria.

So one option is to never speak to you again, preserving that last shred of possibility like on a DNA sample in cryogenic freeze.

(What does happen, by the way, if Dr. Schrödinger just takes the unopened box and packs it away in the attic unobserved? At some point, the dead/alive cat just kicks it anyway from hunger, right? How does the suspended particle/wave decide when it’s time to stop goofing around and do in the cat? Or does his hearing or not hearing the poor animal’s cries bring things to their natural conclusion anyway?)

If you were less amusing, I admit I’d be tempted to consider ex-communication as a workable strategy. Instead, with a sigh, I guess it’s time to share my observations on a situation that, though trivial, sure feels like it deserves the overused word “tragic.”

First, Dixon’s injury cost us a shot at the national championship, but wasn’t it Costa’s injury — barely reported at the time — that ultimately cost us the Rose Bowl? The post-Dixon offense against Arizona, particularly after Leaf’s injury took away his mobility, and against UCLA was among the worst showings of all time, trailing even the third-string-QB games with last year’s Stanford team and possibly the (deep shudder) Hargain-led Ducks of yore. Yet both games were just sitting there waiting to be won. Wouldn’t Costa, judging from the methodical drives he has conducted every time he’s been inserted in a game, have gotten the job done?

I’m surprised how disappointed I was to hear that Dixon was not invited to the Heisman ceremony. It was a foregone conclusion, but I guess I was still holding out hope. Most everyone agrees he was the best or second-best player, but the sense is that his inability to finish the season, missing the final 2.5 games, disqualifies him from serious consideration.

AND YET there is Colt Brennan, holding his Hawaii-to-NYC ticket, despite having missed two full games late in the season with injury — two games, it is worth noting, that his overrated, struggled-against-the-Huskies (!) team had no real trouble winning without him.

It’s not that the Ducks were a one-man show and couldn’t function without Dixon — an argument that probably could be levelled with some validity against Tebow and the Gator offense. If that’s the classic Dominique Wilkins role, Dixon instead fulfilled the much rarer Magic Johnson/Larry Bird role: he made his teammates better.

Initially that consisted of keeping Stewart on track and, more importantly, getting the most out of a receiving corps that at full health was still a primary cause for concern. Linebackers and wide receivers — those were the subjects of my preseason nightmares. Paysinger and Colvin were good, but nowhere near the quality of our usual top receivers like Howry or Demetrius.

What was amazing about this season was the way Dixon (and Chip Kelly, and the surprisingly good O-line) compensated and even extended the offense despite weekly downgrades in available personnel. People called us a “PlayStation offense” and made it sound like Dixon was just the lead in an all-star juggernaut, but the reality is that the guys he was throwing to were all unproven or had bad hands or were too small or hadn’t lived up to their potential or should honestly have been biding their time on the scout team.

The remarkable thing about this season isn’t the speed with which we collapsed after Dixon’s injury — it’s the fact that we continued to perform at the highest level despite a ridiculous string of injuries that should have humbled any team long before.

I have more to say, particularly about the decision making surrounding Dixon’s continuing to play on a blown knee, the sucker punch seemingly inherent in not informing the rest of the team, the inappropriateness of Bellotti’s churlish reaction to be questioned on it, and so on, but that will have to save for another day.

Go, Ducks.