2012 Rose Bowl rolls around Monday, January 2, it will have been 30 days since the University of Oregon and the University of Wisconsin last took the field and played their respective conference championship games in the Pac-12 and Big Ten.
According to Ducks tight end David Paulson, though, that month-long lull shouldn’t too greatly affect the play of either team, “We practice at a speed and in a way that prepares us well for games even with the long layover. It’s hard not going live [for a month], but I think the way we practice helps us.”
Oregon quarterback Darron Thomas concurs, noting that both the Ducks and Wisconsin Badgers “understand the task at hand.”
For head coach of the University of Oregon, Chip Kelly, that task, at least according to Chris Dodd of CBS Sports, is perhaps best embodied by a line of thinking which maintains, “It might be time he win one of these BCS bowls,” this after losing the Rose Bowl in 2010 to Ohio State, then last year being edged out by the Auburn Tigers in the BCS National Championship Game.
In order to do so, Kelly’s Ducks will have to accept the fact that they aren’t “going to out-scheme” the Badgers on offense, while at the same time find a way defensively to successfully address the challenge of stopping its third-straight dual-threat quarterback in a postseason game (Terrelle Pryor in 2010, Cam Newton in 2011, and, this January, Wisconsin’s Russell Wilson).
