Midnight Oil: Resilient Oregon State football ready to throw a wrench at those who doubted them

Published 12:32 am Sunday, November 24, 2024

It’s 12:32 a.m. on Sunday morning. Typically, following a 4 p.m. kickoff, a story like this would’ve already been filed. I’d be sound asleep and not keeping my poor editor up until the early morning hours of his day off.

My bad. 

Concentrated thoughts haven’t been my strong suit this week, so we’re starring at a cursor blink in rhythm with the clock on my wall’s ticking. 

Oregon State put on a show against Washington State. How about those Beavers? A 41-38 win at home on senior night to close out the regular season? End of a Hollywood movie sort of thing. It was a fun watch. But more than anything, it showed off just how big of a chip there is on the Beavs shoulders. 

The past 18 to 24 months have been unkind to Oregon State football.

The Beavers lost the conference realignment game of musical chairs. The proverbial horse has been beaten to death when talking about the mass exodus of talent from players transferring out and the evaporation of the coaching staff. It was kick in the shin after kick in the shin for fans and players who stayed put in Corvallis alike. 

Following the win over Washington State, many players mentioned things along the lines of, “Other teams don’t respect Oregon State.” It was, apparently, something brought up often in preparatory meetings for the Wazzu matchup.

While Oregon State head coach Trent Bray chuckled and denied that his Cougar counterpart Jake Dickert’s comments about, “not being buddies,” with Oregon State because they too were left behind didn’t add any gas to the fire, it was clear from player comments that outside noise was being used to motivate them. 

In other realms of motivation, left guard and team captain Josh Gray said that right tackle Grant Starck had said some words to his team before the game as well. While Starck wasn’t available for comment after the game, Gray said that Starck’s comments had been telling the team that they have nothing left to lose. 

Oregon State finally got to kick back, and they’ll have another chance to do it next weekend, too.

A win on the road at Boise State would get the Beavers to .500 on the season with a 6-6 record and grant them bowl eligibility, but it also would have the chance to throw a wrench in the College Football Playoff. 

Currently, Boise State sits at No. 12 in the CFP rankings and would be slated for a bye week as the fourth highest-ranked conference champion should the Broncos win the Mountain West. They’re locked into a MWC conference championship game appearance regardless of what happens with the Oregon State game.

But a loss — along with the chaos that is the Big 12 Conference — could spark debate for the committee on what to do with the final two auto-bids. Pathways for Army or Tulane from the AAC open up, or perhaps even a 10-2 Big 12 champion Arizona State (that lost to Texas Tech and Cincinnati) squad getting a first-round bye over a one-loss Ohio State or Oregon team due to the 12-team playoff structure. 

It’s chaos.

And while Oregon State isn’t the linchpin of a nuclear meltdown, Trent Bray and his squad get to go to Boise with their fingers on the trigger of making some heads spin. 

For the team that got written off by many after the loss to Air Force — myself included — getting the chance to mess up the darling expanded playoff that, to an extent, has been tailor-made for the conferences who ignored them is the funniest timeline. 

And if the Beavs can keep upping the ante on the “no one respects us” narrative, they just might throw that wrench in.