No. 3 Washington holds off No. 5 Oregon in Pac-12 championship game
LAS VEGAS — As two fan bases thundered and season-long fates teetered through a goose-bump Friday night near The Strip, they played a Pac-12 football championship so hypnotic that it almost grew possible to forget the conference’s impending death and the winner’s impending playoff posture. It seemed almost as if a dazzling collection of athletes got done making plays back and forth and then looked up and said, Where do we stand?
Here’s where they stood after No. 3 Washington led and then withstood No. 5 Oregon, 34-31: Pac-12 football ended up worth mourning as the league disintegrates in realignment, and the College Football Playoff had its first ironclad qualifier. That would be the Huskies (13-0), whose second three-point win over Oregon (11-2) this season means they’ll join the final foursome for the program’s second time, become the first Pac-12 entry in the four-team playoff since the Washington team of 2016, stand as the first unbeaten Pac-12 team in the playoff era and never forget the night the confetti rained purple indoors.
“Wow,” second-year coach Kalen DeBoer began, soon summarizing, “We did it at home. We did it on the road. We did it in wind. We did it in rain.” They did it foremost with pivotal plays at urgent moments in serial games, such that DeBoer cited “a deep, deep, deep belief in our football team right now that when the moments get tough, we can really home in, guys will do their job and not get overwhelmed.”
For this final episode of a season sparkling with purple, they did it in their league’s last football game, before 61,195 in the Las Vegas Raiders’ Allegiant Stadium, in a show of two quarterbacks who have spent the autumn with their names frequenting Heisman Trophy discussions. Both excelled in general Friday night, with Washington’s Michael Penix Jr. steering the Huskies to a 20-3 lead by the second quarter and Oregon’s Bo Nix guiding the Ducks to a 24-20 lead by the third. Yet as the sixth-year transfer Penix finished 27-for-39 passing for 319 yards with two important little first-down rushes, and the fifth-year transfer Nix finished 21-for-34 passing for 239 yards and one mighty rush, Washington did it with two Penix-led drives in particular, two drives to last a lifetime.
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The first, straddling the third and fourth quarters, covered 75 yards in 10 plays, ended with Dillon Johnson’s hard running that helped him accumulate 152 rushing yards against the nation’s No. 8 rushing defense — “I could have lost my leg, my arm, my forehead, my feet and I still would have been out there,” he said — provided a 27-24 lead and ended with 9:04 left.
Then a crucial third-down stop from Washington defensive end Bralen Trice on a Nix run that looked promising at its outset led to the second drive, a marvel covering 82 yards in 12 plays of the steady and the spectacular, ended with Penix’s third-down flip to tight end Quentin Moore for a two-yard touchdown and Moore’s only catch, took a crucial 6:20, ended with 2:44 left, provided a 34-24 lead and upheld Penix’s instructions to teammates between quarters: “Just look at the guy next to you,” Penix recollected saying, “and just trust that he’s going to do his job to win this game.”
Still, this game would not let go so easily, and Oregon needed only 25 seconds to narrow it to 34-31 on Traeshon Holden’s stirring 63-yard catch-and-run from Nix, which included the last 45 yards of Holden weaving up the right side of the field. Then, with one last, clinching third-down, six-yard Penix pass to the sideline to Jalen McMillan, who finished with nine receptions for 131 yards, a “shocking end” arrived, Nix said, calling it “one of those things where you want the moment to last longer than what it can.”
“All right,” second-year Oregon coach Dan Lanning began, “this one hurts.”
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Nix and Lanning and their Ducks reached Las Vegas as the team with the greater hipness, their romp through the schedule since a 36-33 loss to Washington on Oct. 14 pleasing football eyes across the nation, their average win 42-16 in their previous six games. Las Vegas oddsmakers favored them by nine or 10, perhaps a gift to a 12-0 team with technically the higher ranking. The Huskies quickly behaved as if miffed, sharply holding the ball for the first 7:26, hurrying toward that 20-3 lead and a 255-142 advantage in first-half yardage.
Yet the game tightened as such games do, as Oregon wrapped three touchdowns around halftime, one before and two afterward, their offense again unstoppable with Nix throwing and even taking off on a 44-yard scramble. The noise in the stadium doubled. Nix threw two yards to Terrance Ferguson for a touchdown on one hairy third-down play, and two yards again to Ferguson for a touchdown on one hairy fourth-down play, and the game started whirling toward who-knows-where.
Well, Washington specializes in such junctures, to the point that Nix said, “They battled in a lot of games down the stretch” — 15-7 against Arizona State, 52-42 against Southern California, 35-28 against Utah, 22-20 against Oregon State, 24-21 against Washington State — “and they pulled them all out.” Their latest case of that left Nix saying, “Man, you wish it could change. You wish you could go back and do so many different things.”
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After so many plays, and so much Washington advantage — 78-54 in offensive plays, 37:08-22:52 in time of possession, 10 for 15 to 3 for 10 in third-down conversions, 481-363 in total yards, 78-17 in fourth-quarter rushing yards — some ultimate winners took the ultimate victory podium, the last of this vivid conference in one of its stoutest seasons. Penix got his MVP award, and his teammates got their chant, “Michael! Michael! Michael!”
The quarterback who had dipped ever so slightly across recent weeks had resurfaced ever so impressively just before the credits rolled. He had filled the ending with wowing passes such as the 31-yarder to McMillan toward the first fourth-quarter touchdown, and the 25-yarder and 19-yarder to Ja’Lynn Polk along the way to the second. He earned his congratulations from Nix, and he fulfilled what DeBoer said of him: “He’s got all these experiences to draw upon and knows when to take the risk and when not to." Michael Penix Jr., formerly of Indiana, wound up as the last quarterback standing out of the decades of exhilarating Pac-12 quarterbacks. He began aiming for probably the Rose Bowl national semifinal.
And he closed a mournful old league with his thrilling young smile.
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