Keys to the, um, not game. Oregon's bye week

The Ducks get a much needed week off this week, and it comes at a pivotal time in their season. A week from Sunday, the Ducks travel up north to take on the Washington Huskies, and then return home for a Halloween date with the USC Trojans.

Bye weeks can be tricky--they can give a team too much time to think about a loss and they can kill momentum. But bye weeks also give a team time to take a break, and for Oregon, this could be a key.

I almost hate to say this, but I'm beginning to be a little worried about the status of Jeremiah Masoli. When he left the Washington State game early, most people in the crowd thought it was simply because of the blowout.

Then, in the week before the UCLA game news slowly started to leak out of Eugene that he was hurt. You know the rest, Nate Costa played in Masoli's place against UCLA, but Masoli did make the trip down (yet he was not in pads).

Knee injuries always worry me, because they can be extremely misleading. A player with even a serious ligament injury can walk with little to no limp, but when they try and plant their leg, that's when things go wrong.

For Masoli to be an effective quarterback, he needs to be able to have that threat of taking off down the field, and with a bum knee that threat is gone.

A week off before a key game against Oregon's neighbor's to the north gives Masoli plenty of time to rest that knee. The general consensus among the blogosphere is that Masoli will be fine, and I don't disagree at all--I'm just getting uneasy about the fact that we haven't heard anything for sure yet.

I'll close with the ultimate bye week paradox: Oregon needs to stay extremely focused while enjoying the week off. If I knew how to do that, I'd be a coach, not a blogger/podcaster/aspiring broadcaster/you get the point. It's on Chip Kelly to keep the Ducks relaxed and focused on football.

Duck out.