Playing before a home crowd for the first time since 2019, Ohio State lost in Columbus for the first time in more than four years.
The Saturday afternoon outlook for the Oregon Ducks, the ones who barely mustered a victory over Fresno State last week, was decidedly poor. The opponent was third-ranked Ohio State, the Big Ten’s sauntering, swaggering behemoth. The Ducks’ star defensive end, Kayvon Thibodeaux, the man who helped make the Horseshoe magnetic for N.F.L. scouts on Saturday, was hurt. Justin Flowe, a fearsome freshman linebacker, was also out for Oregon, which entered Saturday ranked 12th. In a rematch of the national championship game from January 2015, oddsmakers favored the Buckeyes by more than two touchdowns. None of it mattered much: Oregon stunned Ohio State,35-28, at Ohio Stadium. In just the second full week of this season, half of the teams that reached last season’s College Football Playoff have already lost. And the preseason favorite in the Pac-12, which has not had a team appear in the playoff since the 2016 season, cleared the most conspicuously formidable test on its schedule. Oregon did it with what the Ohio State faithful could have seen as unsettling ease. The Buckeyes never once led in Columbus, where they played before a home crowd for the first time since 2019 and lost for the first time in more than four years. “It was a game that we were never really in control of,” Ohio State’s coach, Ryan Day, said, adding later that there was “enough blame to go around here.” Oregon mastered the Buckeyes not with a particularly exceptional offensive onslaught — the Ducks logged 505 yards, while Ohio State recorded 612 — but by steering away from the catalog of miscues and letdowns that defined Ohio State’s day on both sides of the ball.
