Justin Herbert Uses His Legs To Deliver Oregon A Rose Bowl Win

At any other point during his storied career in Eugene, Oregon, nobody would ever mistake University of Oregon quarterback Justin Herbert for a dual-threat quarterback like Fran Tarkenton, Randall Cunningham, or Michael Vick.

Sure, Herbert had scored 10 rushing touchdowns during his four years with the Ducks, heading into Wednesday’s Rose Bowl game, but given his 2.95 yards per rushing attempt he averaged in his first three seasons, none of the evaluators of the 2020 NFL Draft were going to project Hebert being “the next Lamar Jackson.”

But despite leaving Eugene with the second-most touchdown passes thrown by any quarterback in Oregon program history, Herbert used his legs to help his team defeat the University of Wisconsin in the 2019-2020 Rose Bowl by a score of 28-27, giving the Ducks their second Rose Bowl championship in six years.

Against the air-tight defense of the Badgers, Herbert threw for a season-low 138 yards, and even threw his sixth interception of the season, finishing with his worst passer rating of the year. But the mark of a great player is finding a way to help his team win the game, and that’s exactly what Herbert did courtesy of his career-high three rushing touchdowns, representing all three of Oregon’s touchdowns scored on offense.

In a nip-and-tuck thriller of a game, Herbert kept putting his team in go-ahead position on the scoreboard, allowing the Ducks’ ferocious defense to play with the benefit of a lead for different periods of the game. Oregon took the opening kickoff and went 75 yards on 12 plays, capped off by Hebert’s four-yard touchdown run, to give the Ducks a 7-0 lead to start the game. In the second quarter, Herbert and the offense made Wisconsin pay for an intercepted pass, when he scored three plays later with a five-yard run, giving the Ducks a 14-10 lead.

Herbert would complete the proverbial “hat trick” right around the midway point of the fourth quarter, when he again made the Badgers pay for turning the football over. A Wisconsin fumble gave Oregon the football on the Badgers’ 30 yard line, and on the ensuing play, the entire Badgers’ defense followed running back CJ Verdell on a routine zone-read play, leading Herbert to hold on to the ball and run 30 yards, past a Wisconsin defense that was largely on the other side of the field, to score the go ahead touchdown that put the score at 28-27.

The Ducks’ defense did the job from there, limiting Wisconsin to just four net yards of offense on nine offensive plays. Herbert would put the proverbial icing on the cake when, on 3^rd and 3 with just 1:03 left in the game, his screen pass to wide receiver Juwan Johnson went 28 yards, allowing Herbert and the Ducks to seal the game via the victory formation.

After the game, an emotional Herbert talked about the journey he and the Ducks had taken to get here. In his Freshman year, Herbert and the Ducks finished with a 4-8 record, leading to the dismissal of Mark Helfrich. But the program steadily increased their win total under the regime of Mario Cristobal (who succeeded Willie Taggart), culminating in this year’s Rose Bowl win.