On Beaver and Duck football, reffing in the NBA this season, Keanon Lowe’s movie, Terry Baker and the Heisman and death of a champion …

Tyjon Lindsey (osubeavers.com)

Updated 12/16/2020 3:25 AM

Knocking it around on a variety of subjects on a drizzly Sunday in the Willamette Valley …

• I can’t imagine Jonathan Smith got much sleep Saturday night.

Oregon State’s 27-24 loss to Stanford couldn’t have been much more painful for the third-year Beaver coach.

Losses like that are daggers to the heart a coach trying to build a program.

The Beavers dropped several passes, couldn’t come up with a couple of would-be interceptions or recoveries on a pair of fumbles by Stanford quarterback Davis Mills, sustained six costly penalties, couldn’t punch in a touchdown from the Stanford 3-yard line with the Cardinal leading 24-21 late in the game … and still came within a Chance Nolan fumble in the closing minute of at least sending the verdict into overtime.

A win would have left OSU at 3-3 going into Saturday night’s regular-season finale with Arizona State at Reser Stadium, with a chance to secure the program’s first bowl game appearance since 2013.

Now, it’s one more game and on to the next season, whatever that will look like as we continue to deal with the coronavirus pandemic.

The win over California was fulfilling and the Civil War victory thrilling, but the rest of this season has been replete with near-misses, with the outcome of every game coming down to the wire. The improvement in the program is obvious, but so many close losses wear on the psyche of the coaches and players as well as the team’s fans.

“That’s the narrative throughout the year,” Nolan said after the game. “We’ve been so close in so many of these games. We competed through four quarters, but you have to be better at those end-game situations. You have to be able to produce and come out on the winning side of things.

“We battled, but we want to win these games. It’s a sour taste in my mouth from this one.”

Nolan’s fumble after a scramble inside the Stanford 25-yard line took away what would have been a game-tying attempt at a very makable field goal, along with a crack at a game-winning touchdown.

“I feel like a lot of the weight’s on me from that play,” Nolan said afterward.

Understandable, but I thought the sophomore transfer from Saddleback JC in Mission Viejo, Calif., was terrific in his second start at the major-college level. His passing numbers — 17 for 30 for 221 yards and three TDs with no interceptions — would have been much better if not for several drops of passes right on the money. The 6-3, 200-pound Nolan ran for 53 yards on seven carries and was sacked only once. His decision-making was good and he showed much more pocket presence than he had the week before in his debut at Utah.

“Chance made a huge jump (from his first game),” Smith said. “Played with great effort. Made some big-time throws. Finished some plays for us. You could feel his comfort level out there. He was moving his feet, making some plays running. He was accurate on some deep balls to stretch the field. He played really well.”

Looks to me like Nolan will challenge Tristan Gebbia for the starting job next season. At the least, Smith has a couple of candidates capable of guiding the offense for the next two years, assuming Gebbia chooses to return for the 2022 campaign. And OSU coaches are high on the potential of Ben Gulbranson, a 6-3, 210-pound true freshman from Newbury Park, Calif.

• The Beavers were without three veteran receivers — Champ Flemings, Trevon Bradford and Jesiah Irish — due to injury or COVID. That opened the door for Tre’Shaun Harrison, the 6-1, 190-pound junior transfer from Florida State who debuted after just gaining eligibility. The 6-1, 190-pound junior transfer from Florida State had a couple of drops, but he also caught five passes for 91 yards, including a 61-yard strike in which he showed some jets to sprint past coverage.

Says Smith: “He’s going to be a really good player for us the next couple of years.”

Jermar Jefferson (Karl Massdam/osubeavers.com)

• Jermar Jefferson seems likely to make his final appearance as a Beaver Saturday — that is, unless an ankle injury keeps him out of the game. The 5-10, 215-pound junior will probably declare for the NFL draft. If so, the Beavers will certainly miss one of the five greatest running backs in program history next season, but the cupboard won’t be bare.

B.J. Baylor, a 5-11, 210-pound junior, has shown Pac-12 ability in his backup role this season, and OSU coaches like the potential of Isaiah Newell, a 6-1, 210-pound true freshman from Walnut Creek, Calif. There is also Ta’Ron Madison, a 6-1, 200-pound redshirt freshman. And then there is the X factor — speedy Trey Lowe, the former prep star at Jesuit who transferred from Washington and made his debut for one play Saturday against Stanford.

I won’t be surprised if Newell and the 5-9, 185-pound Lowe see some time in the finale against ASU.

• You can’t help but feel for Oregon after the Ducks’ game at Washington was cancelled due to the Huskies dropping below the required 53 scholarship players due to COVID-19 and contact tracing protocols.

So the Huskies back into Friday’s Pac-12 championship game against Southern Cal — unless they can’t field enough players. Then the Ducks — who are scheduled to face Colorado in the L.A. Coliseum on Saturday — would replace the Huskies against the Trojans. What a strange season of college football it has been.

(Editor’s note: Sure enough, the Huskies couldn’t field the necessary 53 scholarship players. Oregon heads into the Pac-12 Championship Game with a chance to successfully defend its 2019 title.)

• It has been that way in the NBA, too.

I spoke with an NBA referee who worked the Blazers’ Friday night preseason opener against Sacramento at Moda Center — with no fans in the stands, of course.

“It was really weird,” he says. “I had more people in the stands when I was working high school games 40 years ago. Once the game starts, we’re in that little bubble. It’s that 94 by 50 and any outside stuff doesn’t register with you. During the game, they had a lot of ambient noise piped in. That made it feel a little more normal. But before the game, you look around and … man, kind of eerie.”

NBA referees will get tested through the nose every game day.

“And the days we’re home, we also submit saliva tests,” he says.

NBA referees normally don’t work the same venue for back-to-back games. That will happen often this season to eliminate travel. Referees won’t drive to games together. They wear a mask as they walk onto the court and wear a small plastic hood that their whistle fits into to eliminate the spray of germs.

• Pretty cool that Walt Disney Studios has announced it is making original movies in 2021 based on the real-life stories of NBA stars Giannis Antetekounmpo and Chris Paul and … Portland’s own Keanon Lowe.

Lowe is the former Jesuit and Oregon receiver who drew national attention last year when, as a school security officer, he took a shotgun away from a suicidal student at Parkrose. Lowe, then the head football coach for the Broncos, is now an offensive analyst for Chip Kelly at UCLA.

Terry Baker and Mel Renfro.

• Heisman Trophy balloting for this season will soon close, which means it has been — hard to believe — 58 years since Oregon State’s Terry Baker won the award.

Author Tom Shanahan recently interviewed Baker for a book he is writing about multi-sport athletes. He is including a segment on my father, John Eggers, whose promotional campaign as Oregon State’s sports information director helped Baker win the Heisman.

Shanahan reached out to me to provide him some information on my father, coincidentally at just the time I received an email from a former OSU student who had been a part of the campaign.

Here is what I wrote for Shanahan:

Dad was well aware that nobody West of the Mississippi had won the Heisman Trophy before. He knew Oregon State had something special in Terry Baker, who had been hailed as “the best athlete in college sports” by Sports Illustrated as a junior in 1961.

So he devised a plan in those low-tech days to get the word to media members throughout the country. Somehow, he got a list of the 100 or so voters for the Heisman. He enlisted the services of a freshman distance runner on the track team named John Salzer for help.

“John hired me for $2 an hour as a student assistant in the SID office,” Salzer says. "I worked 20 hours a week. Most of it was to get coffee, do odd errands and that sort of thing, but he also assigned me

the task of compiling stats and information on Terry Baker.”

Every Sunday during the 1962 football season, Salzer — who would later serve three years as sports editor of the student newspaper — updated Baker’s stats and collected quotes about him from opposing coaches, players and other sources.

“John would look it over, we’d put together a one-page document, I’d type it up, we’d mimeograph it, I’d run off 100 copies, we’d stuff them in envelopes and we’d send them off in the mail,” says Salzer, now retired and living in Bend, Ore.

I also remember accompanying Dad on Sunday mornings to the Western Union office in a downtown hotel, where he would send telegrams to get off information on Baker more instantaneously to voters.

I asked Salzer if the brainchild for this unprecedented Heisman campaign was my father.

“It was,” he says. “We had no support from (school president) Jim Jensen or the athletic department or anything like that. John also had me get quotes from some of his professors about how a good a student he was (Phi Beta Kappa, a 3.5 student in engineering). The campaign was John’s idea alone.”

Dr. Lee James Watson (oregonlive.com)

• Finally, I received word that Lee Watson, a former South Salem and Oregon football player who had been left disabled in a skiing accident in 1988, died last week at age 72.

I told Watson’s compelling story in this article for the Portland Tribune in 2018.

Readers: what are your thoughts? Share your comments below.

Reach out to Kerry Eggers here.

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