In Rose Bowl Victory Over Wisconsin, Oregon Shows Rebuild Needs Work

Somehow, the Ducks managed to win with only 204 yards in total offense — the fewest by a team in the Rose Bowl since 1979. Seventy-five of those yards came on a game-opening touchdown drive.

“Wisconsin — shout out to them,” Sewell said. “They had a game plan and came with it. I guess that’s that.”

The Ducks, who had not played in a major bowl since being trounced by Ohio State for the national championship after the 2014 season, had hoped to mark their return to national prominence with an emphatic performance.

Instead, they settled for snatching a win while being outplayed.

Of course, the Ducks understand how Wisconsin feels — Oregon blew a 15-point lead against Auburn in its season opener. A loss on Wednesday would have provided another demerit on the standing of the Pac-12 Conference, which has not had a team in the College Football Playoff for three years and saw its next-best teams — Utah and Southern California — get thrashed in bowl games by Texas and Iowa, respectively.

As Oregon has tried to rebuild into a national title contender, from a 4-8 season in 2016, it has not looked back to the days when Kelly and his successor, Mark Helfrich, used blur-speed offenses to carry the Ducks into a pair of national title games. Instead, Oregon has gazed to the Midwest and South — hoping to model the success of Alabama, Clemson and Ohio State.

“If we want to compete on a national level, we have to be big and strong in the trenches,” Shane Lemieux, the senior left guard, said on Monday. “Previously, Oregon’s been known as a bubble-screen team, they want to run tempo. There are a lot of fans saying we’re not scoring 50 points. But the blueprint of our team is really just to win. We don’t really need style anymore.”

The architect of this stylistic transformation is the second-year coach, Mario Cristobal.

He is, not surprisingly, a former offensive lineman at the University of Miami, where he was on two national championship teams. And he won another as the offensive line coach at Alabama, where he coached for four seasons.