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    • Oregon football players react to walk-off win against Boise State
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    Oregon football players react to walk-off win against Boise State

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    For the second week in a row, Oregon’s coach and players were held accountable for an error-prone performance on Saturday night.

    “We didn’t play our best,” wide receiver Tez Johnson said. “We made a lot of mistakes on the field. You always want to go 1-0 every week.”

    Mission accomplished as the No. 6 Ducks improved their mark to 2-0 with a 37-34 non-conference win over Boise State at Autzen Stadium.

    A crowd of 58,134 witnessed a game that went into regulation time, when kicker Atticus Sappington melted the uprights with a 25-yard field goal as the game clock ran out, giving the Ducks the victory.

    “You know, I just did my part, and coach always talks about doing an 11th and I’m proud of that,” said Sappington, the transfer from Oregon State. “That was my whole mindset when I started, doing my 11th to help win the game for the team.”

    The kick was the first game-winning goal of his career — including high school — for the junior at Central Catholic High School in Portland.

    “It’s pretty surreal,” Sappington said. “It’s one of the best feelings I’ve ever had in my life.”

    If anything, it made the Ducks feel better about themselves, especially on a night when the offense struggled (again).

    Oregon finished with just 352 yards, made 4 of 12 third downs, had nine penalties for 74 yards, lost two fumbles and had another at the goal line on a 99-yard kickoff return by Noah Whittington that could have been a touchdown had teammate Jayden Limar not alertly recovered the loose ball.

    Quarterback Dillon Gabriel also had four sacks, just one fewer than the Ducks allowed in all of 2023 and all of 2022.

    “It’s a good thing we have Atticus, because we left it up to chance,” Gabriel said. “And you don’t want to do that.”

    It wasn’t all bad, though, as Gabriel also threw two long touchdown passes and completed 18 of 21 times for 243 yards.

    His first TD was a 34-yard laser to receiver Evan Stewart, who also had a 71-yard catch in the game. Gabriel’s other TD pass was 59 yards to receiver Traeshon Holden.

    But in between those big plays, there was a lot of hard work, but it didn’t yield much. It took 54 plays to get the remaining 188 yards.

    “I don’t think there’s anything that’s going to stop us from having success, we’re just shooting ourselves in the foot,” Johnson said. “False starts, illegal formation, illegal movement, those little things that we can’t have. But we’re aware of that and the coaches are going to do their best to continue to coach those things … and we’re going to do our best to fix it.”

    Johnson also had one of the biggest plays of the game: an 85-yard punt return for a touchdown, the first by a Duck since Ugo Amadi in 2018. The play fired up the crowd and gave Oregon a 27-20 lead late in the third quarter.

    For Johnson, a senior, it was the first punt return TD of his career.

    “My dad, the first thing he said to me was after all these years, you finally got one,” Johnson said. “I didn’t know it was coming in this game. But I told him I said when I was running back, I was going to say, ‘Be aggressive. Just be aggressive.’ As soon as I caught the ball, I was like, ‘OK, here we go.'”

    Johnson said that big play didn’t help him relax. He knew the team was in a “dogfight” against a team Oregon hadn’t beaten in its previous three games.

    “The whole game was just up and down,” Johnson said. “They had some missed plays and opportunities, they had some big plays, we had some big plays, we had missed plays. So it came down to who had the most explosive plays, and we had the most.”

    Chris Hansen covers football, men’s basketball, track and field, cross country, and softball for The Register-Guard. You can reach him at [email protected] and follow him at X @chansen_RG.

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