Oregon was asking for trouble, and it finally got some.

The Ducks’ 39-31 loss at Oklahoma State on Saturday will be billed as a stunner, and to some extent, it should. The No. 6 team in college football was facing an opponent it beat by 66 the year before. The Cowboys had not won an FBS game in almost exactly two years. They hadn’t beaten a power conference team in longer than that or a ranked team since Nov. 4, 2023, when the Pokes beat Oklahoma in the last Bedlam game for the foreseeable future. In new coach Eric Morris’ first game since being hired to spray down the dumpster fire Mike Gundy left behind, he lost to the same Tulsa program that ended Gundy’s tenure by beating him a year ago. For Oklahoma State, this is an all-time moment of catharsis.

More objective measurements also confirm this is one of the biggest upsets you’ll see all year, albeit a good bit short of ESPN’s repeated proclamations that it was one of the biggest in college football history. The Pokes won as 23.5-point underdogs, something five other teams had done since 2024. (The most recent was UMass’ win at Rutgers’ 10 days ago.) Not an unprecedented moment, but a big one. It was the Ducks’ first loss to an unranked opponent in 36 opportunities under Dan Lanning.

Oregon was always in a dangerous spot to open this season, and now it’s in a more precarious spot the rest of the way. The Ducks were the preseason No. 2 team in the AP Poll, and now they look likelier than not to miss the College Football Playoff. And I don’t think that’s as big a stunner as it may appear. Highly ranked preseason poll teams miss the playoff every year — including three of the top five in 2025 — and the Ducks, even with their elite roster, were already showing a few indicators of being another.

None of that’s even because Oregon did anything wrong. The Ducks have been so good that they accidentally made themselves poster children for a new world full of trap doors.

I’d argue that this loss has been in the works since last November, when other programs weighed in on Oregon’s success by hiring away Lanning’s top lieutenants. Oregon lost offensive coordinator Will Stein to Kentucky and defensive coordinator Tosh Lupoi to Cal, replacing them with international promotions Drew Mehringer and Chris Hampton, respectively.

That staffing turnover then met the unfortunate timing of Oregon’s nonconference schedule. The Ducks almost got bitten at home against Boise State last week, surviving 34-27 after getting a second scare from the Broncos in three seasons. Then came Oklahoma State, an easy opponent on paper, but only if you weren’t paying much attention to the college football offseason. The better way to look at Oklahoma State was as a talented offense that happened to have moved into the shell of a terrible program. The Cowboys hired Morris from North Texas, whose offense finished No. 1 in SP+ last season. Morris brought quarterback Drew Mestemaker, record-setting running back Caleb Hawkins, receiver Wyatt Young, and several members of his offensive staff with him. Oklahoma State had not shown much in its opening loss to Tulsa, but the ingredients for an ambush were sitting there.

This is the kind of upset spot that college football fans should probably get comfortable with. It’s now very much in vogue for teams to hire not just new coaches, but a bunch of the players who helped them get those jobs in the first place. What Oklahoma State seems to have successfully pulled off with its North Texas import is perhaps the best example of that strategy in the transfer portal era. They don’t grow Eric Morrises on trees, but more awful P4 teams are going to get respectable quickly by doing this. The 2025 and 2026 Indiana Hoosiers were merely the most high-profile example of a legit trend.

Not that it was written in the stars that Oregon had to lose today. I think it was fate that someone at Oregon’s level would lose a game like this early this season, but the Ducks also suffered failures of planning and execution. Lanning decided to go for it on a late fourth-and-8 when he didn’t need to, and it predictably led to a turnover on downs. His team did not have a good sense of how to deal with Mestemaker’s scrambling, which burned them three different times, including on a game-winning touchdown run on third-and-8 in the fourth quarter. Dakorien Moore, one of the nation’s most hyped receivers, dropped a likely touchdown pass when he was wide open on fourth down in the first half.

In a past life, Oregon might have gotten away with all of that. In this one, it couldn’t. Oregon plays USC on the road in two weeks, and after that it will still have games against a resurgent UCLA program, Ohio State, Michigan, and Washington. Oregon is not going to lose all of those games, and maybe not even one or two of them. But each represents a real opportunity for something to go wrong in an environment where everyone has an expensive roster and nobody, including Oregon, has an overwhelming depth advantage. Oklahoma State has now eaten into the Ducks’ margin for error, and a collection of games with a 20 or 40 percent chance of defeat looks a lot scarier in the aggregate.

I have a strongly held theory that fans of just about every good program in the Big Ten and SEC (maybe with the exceptions of Ohio State and Georgia) will need to get comfortable with relatively frequent 9-3 seasons. NIL and revenue sharing have given every program a meaningful player-compensation base. A program like Oregon can spend way above that level but, even so, cannot maintain the cartoonish depth advantage up and down the roster that elite programs once enjoyed. (Oregon gets closer than most, as exemplified by having former five-star Nebraska starting quarterback Dylan Raiola as a backup.)

The power conferences are consolidating more good teams and forcing their playoff contenders to eat each other on a regular basis. The transfer portal and NIL have crushed the Group of 6 conferences but made everything tighter within the power leagues. When Vanderbilt beat Alabama two years ago, it should have been a sign that a team like 2026 Oklahoma State might beat a team like 2026 Oregon. Michigan’s win with a lousy team over Ohio State in 2024 followed the same pattern, as did Penn State’s losses last year to UCLA and Northwestern — the two defeats that got James Franklin fired. There are just not that many consequence-free Saturdays on which a team like Oregon can work out the kinks.

Oregon has done just about everything right. It has paid for great coaches, great players, and championship upside that remains within its reach. It just hasn’t been able to buy safety.