Posted on 09/28/2002 8:52:30 AM PDT by Tumbleweed_Connection
You could almost hear the anguish coming from Sports Illustrated's headquarters when Oregon State won its first four games this season.
It probably sounded something like ... actually, since this is a family newspaper, we really can't tell you what it sounded like. But the basic tone, minus the expletives, was probably along the lines of, "You guys couldn't do this last year?"
It was a year ago that SI went out – way out – on a limb and predicted the Beavers would be the best college football team in America. It was a wonderfully bold, imaginative, daring pick ... until the season started.
Oregon State lost its first game 44-24 to Fresno State, its third game 38-7 to UCLA and four more games the rest of the fall as it completed only the second losing season (5-6) in Dennis Erickson's 16 years as a collegiate head coach.
"Last year was an embarrassment for everybody, and I wasn't proud to be a part of it," linebacker Richard Seigler said.
Everybody included SI, which dropped Oregon State to No. 35 in this summer's preseason issue. But it looks as if the magazine, and many other prognosticators, might have goofed again.
The Beavers have been perhaps the most impressive team in the Pac-10 and one of the most impressive in the country. They haven't played a tough schedule, but they have hammered all four of their overmatched opponents by a combined score of 190-49.
"They're playing exceptionally well right now," said Washington State's Mike Price, the luckiest coach in the conference since the Cougars don't play the Beavers.
"Oregon State's playing as good as they could be playing in all ways," USC coach Pete Carroll said.
Few around the country have taken notice – the Beavers barely squeezed into the AP Top 25 this week at No. 23 – but all that could change today when Oregon State plays No. 18 USC in a Pac-10 opener at the Coliseum.
Oregon State is a 3-point underdog, but that's due in part to the soft schedule played by the Beavers and the fact they're playing a team they haven't beaten on the road "in 280 years or whatever it is," Erickson said.
The actual number is 42, which means Dwight Eisenhower was president the last time the Beavers beat the Trojans in L.A. Oregon State dropped a Pac-10 record 26 straight games to USC before winning in 2000, and the Beavers are 8-54-4 against the Trojans since 1914.
"It just tells you that they've been pretty good and we haven't," said Erickson, who took over the Beavers in 1999 after Mike Riley was hired to coach the Chargers.
But the Beavers were more than pretty good in 2000 when they went 11-1, capped by a 41-9 victory over Notre Dame in the Fiesta Bowl. Next thing anyone knew, they were No. 1 in a national magazine.
The problem was that SI saw the 11-1 season, the win over Notre Dame and returning offensive stars Jonathan Smith (quarterback) and Ken Simonton (running back), and missed the fact many of the Beavers' other top players were gone.
"You go into a season with two or three stars coming back and you're rated high as opposed to people looking at your team from top to bottom," Erickson said. "Everyone looked at who we had coming back but they weren't looking at who we lost."
The opposite happened this year. Everyone looked at the Beavers losing Smith and Simonton and failed to notice all the excellent players returning, or the fact Oregon State was playing well by the end of last season. In fact, the Beavers were about two plays from finishing with five straight wins, including one over USC when they missed two short field goals in the fourth quarter before losing in overtime.
Defensively, eight starters returned from the Pac-10's third-ranked unit, including at least three all-conference locks – defensive tackle Eric Manning, cornerback Dennis Weathersby and Seigler. And, while Smith and Simonton departed, all the receivers and most of the offensive linemen returned along with two very talented sophomores, quarterback Derek Anderson and running back Steven Jackson.
Inexperience has yet to be a problem with Jackson, who leads the conference in rushing with a 134-yard average, or Anderson, who has thrown 15 touchdown passes and only one interception. Obviously they'll be tested over the next two months, as will the rest of the Beavers, but if comparative scores mean anything, Oregon State beat Fresno State by 40 points two weeks after Oregon beat the Bulldogs by four.
"Since I've been here I've never had a team outhit and outsmart us like that," Fresno State defensive tackle Jason Stewart said after the Bulldogs' 59-19 loss last week. "Never in our life, man. I've been here five years."
And if no one takes notice for a while, that's fine with Erickson.
"This year we have a better team and we're under the radar," he said. "I like it like that."
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