I know, it's a bit late this week again. But we got a little distracted with the OTE news on Monday. It's a few days late, a few dollars short, etc. Let's check in with our Pacific Northwestern friends and dive into the rivalry between the Ducks and the Huskies.
AlmaOtter
Is this rivalry a real thing?
1000% yes. It's got longevity; they're in the Century Club, having played each other 118 times. Familiarity breeds contempt. We've got parity, with the overall series breakdown sitting just off of .500. We've got lore, whether you prefer 0regon (because they have zero national titles) or 12-0 (to refer to Oregon's win streak in the 2000s-2010s. Or maybe 7Oregon to note how in 2016, the Huskies put up 70 points to the Ducks' 21, breaking the 12-0 streak in the process. And throw in some bitterness over Oregon grad Phil Knight's shoe money cannon too. This one is legit.
Where'd you two come from again?
These two were founding members of the Pacific Coast Conference, which blew up spectacularly due to a pay-for-play scandal in 1959. But all the teams that you think of today as PAC-12 AFTER DARK rejoined the shortly thereafter and reconstituted the league as the Big Five, Big Six, Pac-8, Pac-10, and Pac-12. And then Kevin Warren used his short time as Big Ten commish to make an alliance with the Pac-12 and the ACC in 2021, before shanking the Pac-12 by luring away USC and UCLA in 2022. Once those integral members and their big-time media market left the conference, the Pac-12 couldn't stand on its own in the media deal renegotiation cycle. Some of the teams went to the Big 12, Oregon and Washington came to the Big Ten, and a few of the others ended up in the Atlantic Coast Conference. It's all highly illogical and silly, but TLDR: Kevin Warren pulled the Jenga block to fuck up the Pac-12 and then pocketed the Cascadia schools out of the wreckage. The Big Ten is the bad guy here. Or at least one of the bad guys in the 2021-2023 realignment shitshow.
You folks got a trophy or some hardware?
Nope. Bummer, honestly. This rivalry would rate even higher if they had some bizarre traveling trophy to fight over. Back at a previous journalistic outlet of high repute, I posed the question to the former blogrunner at UW Dawg Pound to create a trophy for this matchup: "In the spirit of the Big Ten let’s make it a wooden water dish that a Husky could drink out of and a duck could swim in."
I mean, that's pretty good!
Back in the comments a few months ago, I took at stab at making my own fake historical lore for the trophy:
“The Kiddie Pool”
In 1947, during a particularly hot summer practice in Seattle, a Huskies player noticed that their mascot Wasky was panting and seemed overheated. The next day, he brought in a rubber kid’s swimming pool for the dog to lounge in.
Later that season, the pool was stolen by an enterprising Ducks fan and used near several bird feeders. The pool was stolen back and forth for several years and had been damaged in the process. Little of the original rubber survived, but the fans kept patching it up.
It was lost for a stretch between 1975 and 1981, when it was rediscovered in a fraternity closet.
Let's get to some numbers. What's the series win-total look like?
Alright, I already mentioned this above, but the series-long breakdown is fairly even. Washington leads 63-50-5 for a win percentage of 55.5%. But this hides some of the variance in this rivalry, like the 12-0 streak in the oughts-2010s for Oregon or the sheer dominance that the Huskies had in the 1950s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. They're 5-5 over the last 10, but 17-8 in Oregon's favor this century.
