Guess I was concerned over nothing, huh. In line with your information, then it is quite reasonable to see that our current extra wet year on the heals of two years of a hard drought, could have caused enough stress for the trees to produce extra heavy crops of acorns. Then again; for the last couple of years we have had periods of early warm-up on the heals of winter's end, and a week or so later hard freezes hit after the trees were in the process of breaking dormancy and starting their flowering process. I am happy to hear that the trees should be okay, and that their aborting baby acorns is not a sign that the trees are in decline.

DO NOT TRIM, the leaves might be dead but the branches are not, they appear to be fine. The branches, including the leader will send out new leaves. Just plant in ground and watch during spring. If a tree big or small gets too little water or in your case probably overheated (because you watered) it will protect itself and lose its leaves kinda like it's fall. My guess is the soil and pot got too hot, and you might have even scorched it by watering it when it was so hot, instead of allowing the pot to cool down first. Just plant in ground in fall first, then wait till spring to see what branches leaf out, then if you like trim the ones that didn't. If you want, you could mist the branches that have brown leaves on them just to keep them moist till the first frost.

There are some good photos of diseases of oak leaves on the UGA site - maybe you can match one up. Here is a link that might be useful: Key to Diseases of Oaks in the Landscape

Thanks for your replies. We are located on the Central Coast in California. We are due east of the coastal towns. The tree is large and is obviously old but has undergone some drastic changes just since Thanksgiving. The leaves are now a pale green whereas the oaks near it (within 100') are still healthy looking. I'll look up slime flux and see if that look familiar to what we have. Thanks again.