Oregon Football: Preseason game-by-game predictions for 2017 season

Oregon football slipped to 4-8 and Mark Helfrich lost his job. Will the Ducks return to bowl eligibility in Willie Taggart’s first season at the helm in Eugene?

Last season, Oregon finished the year with a losing record for the first time since 2004. The 4-8 season ended an 11-year streak of bowl appearances for the Ducks. While previous Oregon coaches were able to survive a single losing season, the 2016 results were too much to save Mark Helfrich’s job.

A four-decade head coaching lineage that started when Rich Brooks was hired by UO in 1977 is now history. This year marks the first season for former South Florida head coach Willie Taggart in Eugene. After seven years in the Group of Five at Western Kentucky and USF, Taggart finally gets his chance to lead a Power Five program.

So what does Taggart bring to the table?

Taggart, who worked as Jim Harbaugh‘s running backs coach at Stanford before his first head coaching gig with the Hilltoppers, has already begun to earn ire from some quarters after calling for the program to scale back some of its sartorial experimentation. But the Ducks are still going to be ahead of the fashion curve even if they pare down the number of combinations, and that won’t be the difference between 4-8 and 8-4.

The schedule lines up for the Ducks to rebound from last year’s bowl-free season. Oregon still has plenty of talent throughout its roster that can help return the Ducks to the postseason in 2017. And with three of their losses coming by three-point deficits in 2016, there was not that much separating the Ducks from a bowl appearance last year.

What might the 2017 schedule hold in store for the Ducks as they charge ahead into a new era? Click ahead to see our predictions for each game on the Oregon schedule in 2017.