Game Day Kickoff: Week 11 and the year of the walking dead - ESPN

Oregon was first admitted into the College Football Playoff intensive care unit in Week 2 when Oklahoma State, fresh off an opening-week loss to Tulsa, upended the Ducks in one of the season's first big upsets.

In the four-team playoff era, this would've been a fatal blow. A year from now, it'll be little more than a paper cut.

But we still have a 12-team playoff this season, which meant Oregon's heart was still thumping and, though the Ducks required some round-the-clock monitoring, their playoff hopes were still alive.

Then came the Dante Moore injury.

Then came a home loss to UCLA in which the Ducks looked entirely lifeless.

Then came what surely was the kill shot, a meandering performance against Illinois in which Oregon looked like the guy in «Weekend at Bernie's» — oddly ambulatory but nevertheless dead as a doornail.

And that was the end of Oregon's story.

Or so we thought.

The first playoff rankings of the season offered plenty of surprises, but perhaps the biggest could've been summed up easily by simply reenacting one of the tropes of all great horror movies — only this time, it would be a duck wing lurching up through the dirt as the tombstone that read «Here lies 2026 Oregon» crumbled to the ground.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of Oregon's death were exaggerated.

But the Ducks are not alone in college football's zombie class for 2026.

After all, it was Oregon that appeared to deal USC its death blow, and, it seemed, another nail in Lincoln Riley's coffin. When USC could barely muster a wheeze and a cough against Wisconsin, it seemed the kindest thing the committee could do was to give the Trojans the Old Yeller treatment. No sense prolonging the inevitable. Yet, here we are, with USC arguably underranked