Ohio State vs. Oregon live updates: How to watch, TV channel, kickoff time, odds and what’s new

Oregon athletic director Rob Mullens said Friday that the move to the Big Ten has catapulted the Ducks’ football season tickets back to the high levels of the early 2010s and that Saturday’s top-five game against Ohio State as could be described as the biggest game ever played in Autzen Stadium.

The third-seeded Ducks host the second-place Buckeyes in their first matchup as Big Ten rivals, although it’s also a game fans have been waiting for since long before Oregon left the Pac-12.

“It’s something that people circled on their calendars when it was announced,” said Mullens, who is in his 15th season as AD at Oregon.

Mullen said earlier this week he asked 90-year-old assistant athletic director Herb Yamanaka, who has worked at Oregon since 1959, where Saturday’s game would rank in program history in terms of preparation and anticipation.

“He said it was the greatest thing he could remember,” Mullens said.

According to the rankings, this will be the first top 5 match to be played in Autzen. The last top-10 matchup was against UCLA in 2022, but the last game with this type of preparation was also against a Big Ten team. In 2014, the third-ranked Ducks of the Pac-12 beat No. 7 Michigan State 46-27 behind eventual Heisman Trophy winner Marcus Mariota.

Mullens said the move to the Big Ten has already had a noticeable impact on the program in general.

“I think the first thing we noticed was that someone in our fan base was excited about these Big Ten opponents,” Mullens said. “We have seen an incredibly high renewal rate for season tickets. I think we sold over 11,000 new season tickets. So there was an incredible energy that took us back to (2012), ’13, ’14 when we were (at) our season ticket level. So we went back to where we were when we were a consistent top-five team.”

Away fans are also gobbling up tickets to Oregon games at a much higher price.

“At our last conference we couldn’t have moved anywhere near 3,000 (tickets). Our attendance will be 3,000 spectators at almost every conference game in Autzen this year. So that’s a change, right? These are tickets that previously came back on the market for our fans but will no longer be there,” Mullens said.

Ohio State was originally scheduled to play Oregon in a non-conference game in 2020, but that was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

For many Ohio State fans, this trip has been in the planning stages for some time.

“It’s a beautiful stadium and we really wanted to see it so we thought we’d take it; It’s quite a long trip for us from North Carolina, but it was worth it,” said Ohio State’s Jerome Glasser, a native of Charlotte, North Carolina