OREGON DUCKS FLOCKER ROOM REVEALED

The Flocker Room. image via businessinsider.com

Not quitters, not winners, who are the Oregon Ducks now?

Local sports radio reported a split in the Oregon Ducks locker room.

If it’s a split, that means there’s two locker rooms.

The winning side is the flocker room where the team builds a winning culture; the other side is a college locker room, any college, any sport.

Why is the Oregon Ducks flocker room different?

Players don’t show up in Eugene because Autzen is the end of the line for their sports dreams.

They show up to win, then win again, and leave with the sort of winning record that haunts every team to come after them.

After two runs at the College Football National Championship you’d think winning and effort and discipline was stuck in the flocker room as tight as bark on a Douglas Fir.

When both a senior and freshman both say, according to 620 am, that 30 – 40% of the players are guys just happy to be on the team and playing.

That’s a third of the team or more in the neutral locker room, not the flocker room.

You could tell something was wrong when a speed team like the Oregon Ducks can’t catch anyone, or run away from anyone.

Makes you wonder if they’re saving their energy for the after-game parties?

Playing for a high school with a losing tradition my first year, the coaches accused players of being more interested in the dance after the game instead of the game.

What sort of coach gets a team ready with that sort of talk? Loser coaching creates winners? No.

Then the right coach showed up, but by junior year my class was tainted. We knew how to lose, not win.

Like all good coaches, he won after he got his guys on the field. Us old timers look back and wish we’d been a part of it, instead of the blowout losses that seemed like a regular thing.

I’m not checking, but we didn’t give up 70 points. The biggest was 60, if memory serves, and I’m still trying to forget.

It felt like the whole team was on the same losing page every game, the outcome preordained by years of beat downs.

Sports make good when teams rebound and no one remembers the bad years.

This is where the Oregon Ducks are now:

A bad year with an historically awful loss. At home.

These Ducks need to come together and decide that good year, or bad, they will make a statement of their own.

If that statement is publicly shaming their slacker teammates, things get even worse.

They need to translate their feelings from the locker room, to the practice field, if they ever want to regain the Flocker Room.

Sixty percent of the team needs to pound that forty percent in drills, in the weight room, in class, on campus.

Let the positives of the Flocker Room land on the 40% until they get with the program, or leave the program.