College football Week 2 sees a heavyweight clash of College Football Playoff wannabes as the Boise State Broncos travel to Eugene to take on the Oregon Ducks. While the two teams last met in the 2017 Las Vegas Bowl, the prior encounter in the regular season ended in bad blood between the programs.
Oregon has never beaten the Broncos, but in the 2009 edition of Boise State vs. Oregon, LeGarrette Blount delivered a knockout in that reverberated around college football.
LeGarrette Blount Delivers Knockout Blow in Boise State vs. Oregon 2009 Matchup
Let’s set the scene a little earlier, almost a year earlier to be precise. Boise State had come into Eugene and beaten up on the Ducks, literally. The Oregon staff and players felt like the Broncos had played dirty, delivering late blows after the whistle and purposefully trying to injure prominent Ducks. They felt like they’d been done dirty, so in 2009, they were out for revenge.
Blount was in his first season with Oregon in 2008. In that first-ever encounter with Boise State, he put up 99 rushing yards and a score, but it wasn’t enough to secure the win. Heading into 2009 as the leader of the Ducks’ ground game, he wanted to make a statement.
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However, after the Broncos throttled him back to negative yardage, he made an altogether different statement to Boise State defensive lineman Byron Hout off the field after the whistle, as shown in the video below.
Here’s where we’ll allow Blount to take up the story, as told on Up on Game Presents: Conversations With a Legend.
“The year before we played them (Boise State), they came to Oregon and they beat us. They hit my quarterback late and knocked him out. They hit my tight end late and knocked him out. So it’s personal now.”
“Sports Illustrated covered the game the next year because we were going to play them the first game of the next season. And Sports Illustrated came and talked to us and they were like, ‘What about last year’s game? They hit your quarterback, knocked him out, and they didn’t get a flag for it.’ I’m like, ‘Sh** we owe them an ass-whoopin’. So that’s what we plan on going out there and doing.”
“Sports Illustrated came out with the article and all we see is ‘We gon whoop they ass’ everywhere. We see it all over our locker and everything!”
“It’s game time, we’re ballin’ and fast forward and we lost. And at the end of the game, my head is down and I’m walking off the field. And I’m like ‘Damn, they beat our ass. I ain’t do sh**.’ I’m kind of tight. I hear this guy talking to me saying, ‘Hey? How bout that ass-whoopin’? You said you were gonna beat our ass.'”
“I’m hearing him now and I can’t say nothin’. I gotta take that. I just keep on walking. He gets closer and closer to me and slaps my shoulder pad saying, ‘How bout that ass-whoopin?’ and then the N-word.”
“This ain’t about football no more. Officially you done made it about something else…So I turned around and I punched him.”
There are always two sides to a story, and we’ll likely never fully know what happened that day. For what it’s worth, Hout admits the “ass-whoopin'” comment but in a 2017 interview with The Athletic, maintains he never did, and never would, utter a racial slur.
Their football journeys have taken different directions since, but they will be reunited by this story as Oregon and Boise State face off once more tonight.
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