BYU's deeds trump Ducks' trash talk

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 a good enough 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?

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.

And yes, if Oregon is the Pac-10's No. 5, BYU appeared like it could definitely compete.

The Cougars outgained Oregon 548 to 260 yards. Take away a late 47-yard bomb from Dennis Dixon to Brian Paysinger, and Oregon gained a brittle 213 yards.

But to accuse Oregon of stinking it up would surely subtract from an outstanding effort by BYU, a program without a bowl win in a decade.

This one will go down for the ages. Better than the whipping over Oklahoma in the 1994 Copper Bowl, although the point difference was not as high.

BYU's seniors, John Beck, Johnny Harline and Curtis Brown, took Oregon's defense to the woodshed. The Ducks had no clue how to stop the Cougar rhythm. And defensively, BYU's defenders never looked better through 12 games this season, sacking and blowing up Oregon plays and fouling up error-prone big, fast, scary Duck receivers.

Check that. Perhaps the shutout of Utah State was more complete.

This was one of BYU's finest bowl performances ever, putting a fitting cap to an 11-2 season while drawing the largest crowd to ever witness a team sporting event in Nevada.

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E-mail: dharmon@desnews.com