Cougars act part on Vegas stage

LAS VEGAS — It was supposed to be a shootout between two potent offenses.

BYU brought all its actors, and they scripted out. Oregon showed up in Las Vegas as losers of three in a row and played like it in the Las Vegas Bowl on Thursday night.

The day after Oregon head coach Mike Bellotti told reporters BYU just wasn't good enough of a football program to compete at the highest level of the Pac-10, he proved his Duck team, once ranked No. 11 in the country, didn't belong in the same zip code with the Cougars.

Who'd say these kinds of things?

BYU laid the hammer to Oregon here. It wasn't even close. And it was an air hammer, handled by carpenters who took pride in their craft.

Before kickoff, the Las Vegas fire department worked on a broken sewage line just outside Same Boyd Stadium's front gate, and the odor floated around the north end zone most of the game. Most of the record crowd of 44,615 thought that sewer break was the origin of the smell. But you could have mistook the stench for plain old Bellotti's Ducks.

Oregon came to Vegas with a hoity-toity Pac-10 superior attitude, wearing Flash Gordon cosmic helmets atop uninspired defensive and offensive players who were more interested in talking smack than backing it up on the field.

Maybe the bowl should have waited and invited UCLA instead of Bellotti's bozos.

"After we went three-and-out a few times to start the game, they thought that's how the whole game would go and they were talking." BYU senior offensive lineman Jake Kuresa said.

"They were talking all night. When it was 31-0 and 38-8, they still didn't catch on that they were getting beat pretty bad and they kept talking down to us. If they didn't learn through the game and what happened that we need respect, I'm sure their coaches are telling them in the locker room right now."

Kuresa said the Pac-10-vs.-little-MWC theme was going on all week with Oregon, and BYU felt disrespected.

"I don't know why they have big heads, or big egos, but I think they're a lot smaller after the game," Kuresa said. "We've been executing all season. We did tonight. There is a reason we're ranked and they're not. If they can't respect that, they learned the hard way."

If Oregon has the No. 8 offense in America and was the Pac-10's No. 1 pass defense, the Cougars were the San Diego Chargers and they just beat the Houston Texans.