Solar

Great article and comments. Certainly there will be an endowment of some kind to continue supporting Oregon's athletic program. Certainly being a premier team in the "consolidation of power" era will ensure that the best level set funding provided by the conferences will be as good as anywhere. My question is what happens to the level of Nike involvement, dare I say integration with our athletics program? Will we continue to be used as proving grounds for the state of the art by Nike? Will they continue to be involved in NIL and use players as an employee pipeline? I would like to think enough history is there that the status quo continues to be the path forward as a mutually beneficial arrangement, at least until some hotshot CEO decides to move Nike headquarters to some low cost southern state.. Some of it depends on what happens to the 20% voting shares of PK. Is it sold or just administrated as part of the estate.

So we live rent free in the USC players heads too, not just their fans.

I doubt Cristobal is going anywhere. He's home. I want to say the same for Dilly, but he would have to be tempted by the salary and potential prestige if he's confident enough in himself. Maybe Cig? Bama has to let the ugliness play out a while. If you fire a 9 and 4 coach, who the heck is going to want that job? Only someone hungry for the extra millions. It would have to be an up and comer, not some already established elite coach.

QBs don't target WRs they don't trust. They don't trust them to be open, run the right route, or catch the ball. Sometimes maybe it's lack familiarity, not building that trust in the off season and camps. Partly why I was so excited about Malik is how frequently Moore was willing to send the ball his way in the first game. Moore trusts what he is capable of. I do expect it to carry over to this Saturday, and if it does, we'll all notice because I expect Moore to air it out if our OL can buy a little time against the rush.

The infamy of the "Texas is BACK!" call was when they beat ND in the 1st game of the season. It turned later that both teams sucked. 1 data point doesn't make a trend. We'll just have to see a few more games to even begin to have an idea of how good these first wins and losses really are. That's why I'm fine with the rankings right, because as long as they are in the ballpark of reasonableness they did fine.

Washington is my #1. No DT should have that many tackles and that much time spent in the backfield. He wrecked the run game for the #1 rushing team in all of college football.

Bizarrely, I have zero issues with this list. I think they got it pretty much right.

It's Tuesday! I've been making the same mistake all morning.

ROC boys on YouTube commented how Montana State deliberately played a defensive scheme to limit explosive plays (nothing over the top). Oklahoma State with Todd Grantham as DC is extremely aggressive with pressure (remember the ASU teams that brought the house every play?) So this will be great to see how Dante handles pressure as well as how he, Dakorien Moore, Sadiq, and Benson can take the top off a defense. We'll probably see a lot more Mahki Hughes since he is the best pass rush blocking RB.

Maybe he thought Bryant was gonna make the 1st guy, who was late coming over, miss, so blocking the second guy was clearing the path for the touchdown. One of those cases where the player ends up being right even though it wasn't how the coach drew it up. Don't get me wrong; against Penn State I definitely want Moore to block the first guy in that exact situation.

The ND true freshman QB started getting more comfortable later in the game and the offense started to open up a bit. I recall us with MC as head coach beating OSU when they had a true freshman QB in the first game of the season...Not sure we would have beat them later in the season even if MC didn't have one foot out the door.

I'm just a simple design engineer worrying about space. Moving the ball past the point it's snapped requires some kind of path somewhere. Putting 22 people in a space the size of a classroom and trying to move the ball forward 5 to 10 feet is a pretty tall ask. Like you guys are saying, if perfectly executed and the defense guesses wrong it will work 100% of the time. So if it is a true coin flip (based on the defense' guess) and you have 3 downs to pull it off then odds are it will work. And it definitely sets up well for a sequence play of the outside blocker releasing into the flat for a pass. Just don't run it on 4th and 1 in a frenzy and I won't complain anymore.

Yikes. Maybe they'll get it sorted out later. Everyone keeps saying that on paper Alabama is the most talented team in the country. That points at a coaching problem, but... Perhaps their 5 star freshman QB can get up to speed soon and take over for Simpson and be a Penix like miracle worker. Perhaps the Grubb offensive scheme is a big adjustment for the players to get used to. And FSU was really balling. It's still really early to completely write Alabama off.

Great article, lot's to be excited about. I think MSU was probably better than Northwestern and little bro U are. We're going to be a problem in the B1G again this year. I wasn't crazy about the shotgun full house formation. It's like trying to clog 2 more players through the same pipe and compacts the defense over center even more, and it takes longer for the exchange to happen while the DEs and DBs crash down like a pistol run. I'm not a fan. You'd be better off removing the QB with a wildcat snap and putting a WR way outside to pull away one defender. I remember Taggart running something similar based on the same premise of having all these good backs so get them on the field at the same time. It wasn't worth more than a shoulder shrug and I think it faded as the season progressed.

He ran a 10.4 in high school. I think game breaking would be a matter of route selection. Now that he has leaned out, bring on the double moves. He will likely be every bit as dangerous as Evan Stewart which is the point of this thread. Thoughts of concern about not being able to replace Evan Stewarts ability and production have been addressed by Malik Benson's development. I'm projecting a little bit, but I'm trusting my eyes here. I'm excited about our ceiling in the passing game.

I think there is a reason the QBs don't throw Kasper's way very often. He struggles to finish. Routes, catches and run after the catch. It's great he's so tall, but the downside of that is I don't think he has the coordination and balance required to be a great receiver. His target to completion ratio including spring games has to be the worst I have ever seen. That being said, I hope he does well when he plays, unlike the rest of his career at Oregon to date.

We really need a solid 3rd option at receiver in addition to Bryant and Moore. Instead we got an elite receiver, Malik Benson. Yes, elite. He was merely good with an elite ceiling arriving at Oregon in the spring, and he is now elite. The size, the speed, and now the agility, having looked like losing 10-15 pounds of baby fat since the spring game. Ross Douglas has also clearly been helping him in the other facets of his game, running crisp routes and positioning himself well relative to defenders. Moore has clearly recognized this, by targeting him more than any other receiver. It is just a sample size of one game, half a game really, and maybe he gets cases of the dropsies, and plays uninspired for stretches of games, but if he doesn't, look out, he will be as good or better than Troy Franklin. I'm really excited about him.

LOL, now you give us the freedom when their is nothing to complain about! It's like your parents finally letting you take the car out by yourself for the first time and it's Sunday morning and all your friends are out of town. Joking aside, I appreciate the introspection and adaptability. Hopefully there is little to lose our "stuff" over this season.

I think I'm just as impressed how some of the top tier transfers are fighting for a spot against our HS recruits. I'm really pleased with the level of development I'm seeing from our young talent too.

I kept thinking that I hope Oregon is making their list of who they are going to pay dearly to keep one more year if we don't win a natty. Can we keep 1st round talent happy in Eugene for 2026 like Michigan in 2023 OSU in 2024 and Penn State in 2025. If we don't win it all this year 2026 should be our year.

I'm curious what people's thought are on Will Stein's offensive scheme for this year. To be clear, the ultimate metric of offensive is point per drive (and in a perfect world also factored by starting field position), and we did really good. It's an interesting sample against Montana State, where it seems pretty obvious the coaches were treating the game more as a proving ground rather than trying to exploit every match-up, so in a way it was a great look at the scheme Stein would really like to run this year, even though the playbook was kept small. But I don't believe it was kept so small that we didn't see the strong tendencies of this offense through the season. The.thing that stuck out to me is the lack of eye candy and option football. This appears to be a relatively straightforward pro-style scheme where the goal is to impose our will against the opponent with our better talent. The isn't much in the way of who has the football and presnap misdirection. There simply is a "am I going to hand it off, throw wide to the left or the right or down the field"; basically the defense has to guard the whole field every play. The real quick decision making being imposed in the QBs is working through their progression, not RPO or run option football. I'm guessing there are two reasons for that, #1 they prefer the Oline not have to hold back on blocking down field past five yards. These road graders routinely were past 5 yards when run blocking. The other reason is I'm still not convinced our QBs are great at split second decision making, at least not yet, maybe by the end of the season or next year. Lastly the QB and RBs seems strongly coached to take what the defense gives you, don't swing for the fences, which contributed to more methodical drives rather than a large number of explosive plays. I kept thinking to myself, so this is what it used to look like for Bama fans when they beat every mediocre or bad team by the same 60-10 score with very little in the way of amazing highlights, just pure domination. What do you all think?

I keep hearing about arm talent, but I didn't see anything super special. His spiral wasn't that tight and he overthrew quite a few open receivers. I'm judging him against the accuracy of Bo Nix' final year and Justin Herbert's last few years, so it's a pretty high bar, but when people start saying best ever, I'll say not yet. The bigger thing to me was he had command of the offense and his progressions. HOWEVER, that 3rd down play near the goal line after the blocked put was not good decision making. He got flushed out of the pocket, and ran out of bounds 5 yards short of the goal line accomplishing nothing. The announcers praised him for it, but he had the time to hold being the LOS and wait for someone to win the scramble drill. So I'm holding final judgement for seeing him operate with some consistent pressure. I do expect Dante to continue to improve like the rest of the team.

Watching the condensed game on you tube, Noles were balling and playing really hard, that impressed me the most. They are for real if they play that kind of inspired ball all season. Almost seemed like Alabama's O line was bad, but not enough footage to see for sure

Oregon 48-13 2 3 213 We shall see..

I love the white outline on the numbers; it gives definition and makes the colors pop.