Duck Stuff: Morning Mud

• Rob Moseley covered practice yesterday. It was held inside the Mo Center in full pads. LB Eddie Pleasant was on the sidelines with a sore ankle which meant that Bryson Littlejohn was taking the reps.

• Rob also has a feature story titled "High Performance - Oregon’s finely tuned run game meets Stanford’s diesel power."

Moseley looks at the contrasting styles each team, and their runners, bring to the game.

“We’re obviously a shotgun, zone- running operation, and they’re an I-formation, pound-it-at-you deal,” UO coach Chip Kelly said. “And they’re really good.”

• One last story from Moseley on the return men for Oregon and Stanford. The Ducks have Kenjon Barner and the Cardinal counter with Chris Owusu. They are ranked 1-2 in the Pc-10 and 5-6 nationally.

But there’s no guarantee either returner will find much room to run inside Stanford Stadium — the Cardinal lead the conference in kickoff coverage, as well, and the Ducks are second.

Should make for an interesting matchup and could be a deciding factor in the outcome of the game.

• I will finish today with a story by Ted Miller that I really liked on how difficult it can be for opposing defenses to find the ball.

"They out-executed us. We came out slow. We just really couldn't find the ball and they were doing everything right", said Trojan LB Chris Galippo.

Miller closes his story with this:

Chip Kelly schools his quarterbacks on ball fakes and misdirection maybe better than any coach in the nation. You often see defenders, their heads swiveling, spend one or two clicks scraping the wrong way.

In all the offenses I've watched in person, I don't know if I've seen one that consistently hides the true location of the ball as well as Oregon's. The gaps of nonrecognition from a defense -- and audience -- are palpable when the Ducks are clicking.

GO DUCKS!