Oh good, Oregon's not soft anymore

Why is "Oregon beat FSU so you can't see Oregon as soft anymore" a storyline? I heard it during the broadcast, I've seen it on ESPN and SI websites. I don't listen to talk radio or watch ESPN etc., but I'm sure it's all over the airwaves as well. This is a program that's seen success through three different head coaches, that's beaten USC and UCLA and Stanfurd in the Pac-10/12; that has beaten Kansas State and Texas and Wisconsin in major bowl games recently; that does so in part because its players are so well-conditioned they can run other teams into the ground (and yeah, that's "tough"). Ohio State isn't getting that vocabulary applied to it after beating Alabama, so I guess a soft OSU has never been part of the narrative--they just weren't very good for a bit there.

So is that "soft" storyline simply a refuge of lazy journalists? Is it just playing to the preconceptions of a bunch of college football fans who've spent the last decade insisting their conference is the only one in which real football is played and that teams out west are "soft" (which basically has seemed like a means of denying Pac-10/12 and minor conference teams access to the national championship whenever possible)? Is it just code for deriding sophisticated offensive innovation in favor of some conservative, romanticized impulse? Because I've been watching Pac football for 15 years, and watching other college games more the last few years because I live on the East Coast and can't find games I'm really interested in, and I don't see qualitative differences I'd characterize as "soft/tough." That's not to say that there aren't stronger and weaker conferences, stronger and weaker programs, stronger and weaker teams, but those characteristics are hardly as permanent as this shocked "Oregon's not soft" narrative would seem to imply.

So basically it seems like a made-up vocabulary designed to deny that western conferences and independent teams are equals of those in the southeast. And this reporting simply perpetuates that implication, even if it's one that makes little/no sense to people who've been paying attention and levying an honest assessment of what they see, rather than simply what they want to believe.