05:31 PM ET  12.06 | So many what could have beens for this football season.  Teams with 1 loss and 2 losses are all playing in the national championship game and in all the major bowl games.  I have heard people talk about all the WHAT IFs for this season.   Now it makes me sit back and look on the Oregon State Beavers season.   What if we had won 3 of the 4 losses this year.  Its not like we didn't have our chances.  You look at the Cincy game that we lost 34-3.  Looking at the score you would think OSU had 100 total yards and Cincy ran all over them.  It was exactly opposite.  OSU outgained the Bearcats by over 100 yards and had more first downs.   But 6 costly INT and a fumble on kickoff return and Cincy turns a 10-3 halftime lead into a 34-3 lead after 3 qtrs.  You look at the Arizona State game and again, the score shows that the Sun Devils beat us 44-32.   But the Beavers had a 19pt lead after the first quarter.  They out gained the Devils in yds and first downs again, but had 5 int and a fumble.    Turnovers kill us again.   A home game against UCLA.   The Beavers jump out to a 14-0 lead.  Going into the 4^th Qtr they held a 14-12 lead.  In a 7 min span, they go from up 14-12 to down 40-14.  2 int and 3 fumbles on kickoff returns and it allows the Bruins offense to use short yardage to win this game against a tired defense that go no rest in the second half.

My thought this year is why cant we (Oregon State) play 4 qtrs of football?    Why cant we play good in Sept, but we can in October and November?   In the first quarter this season we have outscored every opponent by 90 points (this is not including Idaho St).  In the last 3 quarters we are outscored by 76.   We started off fast in every game but then just took a seat and let the other team catch up and 2 times losing the game because of it. If we could have just scored a few more points or even gotten a few extra firstdowns so the defense wasn't so worn down.   In Sept this year, we were 2-3.  Oct and Nov 6-1.   Last season we started out 2-3 and finished 9-4 after the bowl game victory.  It seems that the coaching staff takes to long getting the players up for the games.  If they would get the idea that we are no longer the Bavers of the 70s, 80s, and 90s where we would have been happy with any bowl game.  This is the 2000s when we have been to 7 bowl games in 9 years. We want the big bowl games.  We want respect.  We want to be picked in the top 3 of the Pac10 and finish 1^st, not picked 7^th and finish 3^rd.   We didn't add 12,000 seats to Reser Stadium to watch a team hoping to get to a bowl game. 

 

But now I wonder.  What if we had beaten Cincy, ASU and UCLA.  We would be 11-1 now instead of 8-4.  What if we were playing 31 days from now in the National Championship game.   What if?