VERNON ADAMS, OREGON DUCKS, SLIP SLIDING AWAY?

via milive.com

Oregon Ducks played half a game, the Vernon Adams’ half, and won that half.

Let’ get it straight at the start:

Vernon Adams, Jr didn’t just take a shot to the helmet and get knocked out of the Alamo Bowl Saturday night.

He scrambled, then leaned forward after a run.

One Horned Frog drove a hat into his lowered head while another popped him in the ear hole.

That’s football. Maybe a concussion helmet would have helped?

One thing we do know is you don’t get head injuries if you don’t get hit in the head.

Slide, Vernon, slide.

It’s okay to slide, to do that move where you run up and drop to your butt just before you get hit.

You’ve seen manly men slide. It’s not effeminate to slide, no matter how many times your old man says today’s quarterbacks ought to wear a dress.

Sliding quarterbacks help the game.

No one wants to see guys get clocked, lay on the field, then get packed off. No one. And no one wants to see another player knocked out and twitching.

We watch college football to see great players do great things, and Vernon Adams is a great player. If you didn’t know how great, now you do.

This is a player who can carry a team. He carried Oregon. Great players can do that.

Here’s a guy who followed his sports dream to a new school and his old school turned on him.

Petty attitudes do that.

With administrative problems hampering his degree, he showed up late and played catch up in the Oregon system.

Then he got hurt and the other season started, the Oregon Ducks without Adams.

Just like the second half of the Alamo Bowl, Oregon without Vernon Adams is hard to watch.

They look just as good, run just as fast, jump just as high, but without Adams it’s not enough.

How does one guy make everyone better? That’s the magic of sports. When you see a player with that skill, you look for it from people in your real life.

People who say they aren’t sports fans miss this important point: good people in your life help make you a better person.

If you don’t believe that, you don’t watch enough sports.

Vernon Adams played for the Oregon Ducks long enough to show how a change agent affects an established environment like the Ducks.

If you’re good enough, and believe you’re good enough, others start believing too.

Maybe that’s what Oregon Duck football has been about with that string of 10 win seasons now broken.

Dynasty or not, and most of the time dynasties win titles at the end of the year, Oregon gives fans a clean slate to cheer for.

There’s no shadows from past greatness haunting every season. The best coach did his work and left. All that’s left is a chance to live up to each season’s expectation.

Was Vernon Adams good enough? He was.

Was the Alamo Bowl good enough? It is if you beat Stanford’s Rose Bowl team.

Were the Ducks good enough? You tell me. Slide it in here.