David Marsh

All I know is don't count Novosad out. Even if he doesn't start I wouldn't be shocked to see him called upon for an important play or two this season if Moore goes down. And vice versa. Is Novosad starts over Moore I'd be thrilled because that means Stein definitely got the right guy for the job. If Moore gets the starting job, it means Lanning and Stein went into the portal and got the right guy for the job.

I know in years past Lanning hasn't done a strict first team, second team, third team until about halfway through fall camp. They tend to like to look at how different groups and players work together and build connection beyond just the ones and twos. The goal is to find the best players and encourage competition and leadership opportunities. So they'll be doing plenty of mixing and matching between all involved for the first two weeks for sure. I think by week 3 we have a pretty solidified ones and twos and by the week before the first game it will be set. But even then this coaching staff tends not to set everything in stone because sometimes players put it all together a little later and work their way into the rotation. And speaking of the rotation... I think the goal this year is to rotate 7 linemen around on offense. Keeping fresh legs in there is important when they can and keeping an extended unit together also helps smooth out injuries. But my guess is they'll know who the starter is in a week and will start to solidify things in two weeks with the projected starters working together more regularly after that.

USC inder Riley really did attack the portal pretty hard BUT he did so in a very skill position way. He grabbed a ton of his skill players from Oklahoma and other schools, he took Travis Dye from us. But he neglected the line of scrimmage that couldn't easily be fixed via portal. But the biggest shocker I've found is their absolute failure to navigate NIL. Suddenly when it's legal to pay players they can't manage to do it? It certainly feels more like institutional chaos and ineptitude over strictly coaching. However, Riley has treated his love to USC like he's still playing in the Big 12. At first in the Pac-12 and now the B1G. In both cases his offense first approach didn't work, outside of 2022 where he had a very favorable schedule and even then they lost to Utah twice. USC certainly wants to appear like they know what they're doing but it's always been flash over substance for them.

Yeah I noticed they decided to stick with rivals as well. On3 has a rising brand and does a good job with recruiting information. Rivals just didn't seem to have that going for them. But on3s rankings always felt 3rd or 4th behind Rivals and 247s rankings and maybe even ESPN's which still feels like something they just throw together. It'll be interesting to see if they change how the rankings work as On3 has a bit of their own methodology.

Big big shame that USC and Ole Miss don't play this year. Just think... Riley would have had the rare opportunity to get beat by two former USC head coaches if they played. Instead we'll just have to settle for the return of Clay Helton who is doing a decent job at GS. But Kiffin getting a shot to beat USC would have been sweet! Does he still have a former USC kid at QB too? Gahhh missed opportunity.

Where are the "Bring back Helton chants?"

Well... USC's NIL is happy to pony up $10 mil plus for a high school recruit who hasn't played a down of college football and won't until next season. But they couldn't find the money to pay their best offensive lineman? Suureeeee... "Tampering".... Whatever helps you sleep at night USuckers.

Los Angeles TimesCommentary: At sagging USC, Lincoln Riley should be on th...USC is no longer one of the top programs in college football, and Lincoln Riley is a big reason why the Trojans have remained mired in mediocrity. Article is a fun read as it uses the last 16 years of Trojan mediocrity to put things in perspective. And they don't mention the Ducks once. But we all know they are thinking of us.

Though I believe the lawsuit will come officially from the players, as they are the injured party with standing as they are the ones losing the right to sell their NIL, I also fully believe that NIL collaboratives will be happy to pony up the money for the lawyers. Many of these collaboratives do love having an influence on their programs of choice. Are there some problems at play? Absolutely... But oddly enough I think the biggest counter to all this isn't just trying to sweep away NIL, but it is what becomes of the court case between Wisconsin and Miami. That case concerns revenue sharing and contracts that bind players to universities. Those contracts that players enter into as revenue sharing should be the key to combating some of the transfer mania. If players break those agreements they should have to pay up on a major way, not unlike coaches who leave for another school. NIL needs oversight and limitations. Abolishing it entirely without something to replace it is going to be messy. Too many people and parties have NIL money mixed up and on the line.

Not getting political but as a high school government teacher here are the problems I see with this executive order. Executive orders are NOT laws thought they can be administered like a law. 1a. Who is going to administer this order? The NCAA? 1b. What realistic power of enforcement will they have? This is not a law, so how will it interact with existing State laws that do allow for NIL payments. Oregon, Washington, and California I know for a fact all have State laws that allow for NIL payments. I believe Tennessee passed a law last year to allow for even more freedom in NIL payments. Though not 3rd party payments, there is still the House Settlement that will complicate player payments. A lawsuit is certainly coming, most likely from players (probably with some support from NIL backers) because this would be a massive rule change for them. There are probably more questions that will crop up about this executive order but these are my initial thoughts.

It's fine... We can hang under the radar for now.

Right now our traditional rivals that we actually still play rank as such. Washington USC Oregon State UCLA UCLA fans are tepid on their own program, let alone ours which is why they rank last here but who knows when we'll play another former Pac-12 opponent. Beavis hates us more than we hate them at this point so at least there is some hate involved. USC and Oregon was a blue blood v new blood game and they Trojans want to put us in our place. We want to put the Trojans in their grave and bury the old timers. Loads of hate to go around. Then... Washington... Need I say more? No one is over looking this game between us and USC.

I think Helfrich did a great job with QBs. He found and coached Mariota for his first two seasons. He coached Darron Thomas who has a great red shirt freshman season. Scott Frost, Helfrich's OC and QB coach, I feel came up short on developing new college QBs. He could polish a QB... See Mariota and Adams but both were already very good QBs who knew the basics. But when it came to taking raw talent and elevating it... That just never happened. A couple four stars were brought in and left without ever developing. That shows a lack of introductory development. Helfrich as a QB coach didna great job on that front. Though he probably needed to have more say in the development of the young QBs brought in.

I think we would look more kindly on these if we won that game. I don't think we would like them or even love them... I think we would simply not hate them. But because we lost we hate them because they remind us of losing to Colorado and that was their only win over us in the Pac-12 era. Also it was Colorado's only good team. They made the Pac-12 champs game.

Not so much with NIL as that comes from outside the program and cannot come from the program itself. However, with revenue sharing becoming a thing soon that will put strain on them.

Came across this on YouTube. The 2014-15 Rose Bowl in 30 mins. The best single game of the Helfrich era. Also... The best game out of Thomas Tyner. He was just figuring out how the college game worked before a surgery left him out for the following year and then he medically retired. Only to come back for some lackluster season at Oregon State. Freshman Freeman was a beast. That was fun.

Not sure how I feel about this. Players who reclassify tend to have to sit out a year or two anyways before making an impact because of body development more than anything else. I'll have to see if I can find the article but someone did a break down of how reclassified players rarely reach the potential of their rankings. So hoping this plays out well.

Combine that with the Alamo Bowl and that's the end of things. Defense has been the Duck's weakness for a long time. And that's what makes the Lanning era exciting right now.

Gray is always always always a bad look for our Ducks. At best they look meh at worse they look like pajamas.

The Bo Nix era uniforms kinda brought back an updated version of the shoulder. Kinda a nice updated version of that look. But I wouldn't mind seeings these as a throwback for one game in a season.

It's been long enough now that I wouldn't mind seeing some more recent throw backs.

I agree that Nick would have been the best choice. Though I think the end of the legacy staff was fast approaching regardless of who was HC.

It did but it was also higher than Bellotti's so when I say norm... He is basically the average of Kelly and Bellotti. Regardless the recruiting game needed to improve. Kelly's average was helped by really one incredible recruiting class and being the hottest offense out there. I would argue that Kelly wasn't going to improve recruiting if he stayed and he probably would start to look more and more like Helfrich's numbers if he stuck around. The engine of Oregon recruiting was quickly becoming outdated ... A change needed to happen.

He was actually in the Oregon norm for the most part. https://fishduck.com/2022/02/a-defense-of-helfrichs-recruiting-legacy/ He was still under the shadow of the Kelly sanctions which reduced scholarships by a couple per year, not great but not a killer, but what really hurt was the amount of official visits per year dropped from 35 (max) to I believe 28 (I think it's in my article posted above). That was killer to Oregon recruiting at the time because the key was always get likely commits on campus and lock them in with the facilities. That is more or less still the case under Lanning. But with 23-25 scholarships spots and only about 28 official visitors allowed, they had to get really really selective as to who they would give an official to because they couldn't afford to take as many long shot recruits. Great example of a long-shot (that paid off) was Kayvon Thibodeux under Cristobal. He didn't see the Ducks as that much of a contender but decided to take an official visit and just take a look at the program. His time at Oregon completely blew him away and that was what sealed the deal for him. However, for every KT out there there far at least 3-5 misses. Even the master recruiter Lanning has suffered a TON of high profiles misses this recruiting cycle. Oregon was already a conservative recruiting operation and it got worse with those sanctions. The first recruiting class Helfrich would have had without sanctions was 2017 and the uncertainty of his position hurt that class. Taggart took over and brought in a class of a lot of Helfrich recruits who would go on to be stars... more on this soon as I finish the Taggart article. I do believe context gives us a fuller picture of these individuals. They're human and by default complex. And not to make myself out to be too much of a Helfrich homer but I do believe Helfrich had a culture problem within the program developing and it manifested in 2016. If he was save his job he was going to need to revamp the Oregon culture, which obviously didn't happen.

I don't knock the Pellum hire, it was the Oregon way to hire from within when possible and Pellum was close with Aliotti for the better part of 20 years. That seemed like a safe and surefire hire. It didn't work out that way in the end. Pellum didn't have the aggressiveness that Aliotti had when it came to scheme and play-calling. Hoke was a super-duper-major fail and he was the highest paid Oregon staff member that wasn't the HC at the time of his hire. The Ducks paid out for that disaster. There are so many things that went wrong with that hire. I think first and foremost was that Hoke wanted to shift Oregon's defensive front from the 3-4 to a 4-3. The biggest problem in this shift was that Oregon outright lacked the proper bodies to pull it off. It needed more defensive linemen and a part part of Oregon going for a 3-4 defensive front as to reduce their dependency on those linemen who are difficult to recruit as there aren't very many of them. From there on out it all just fell apart. I like to think if Helfrich was given another season Hoke would have been fired and he would have had another shot at hiring. Perhaps the biggest weakness in Brooks-Helfrich era was that Oregon was so dependent on hiring from within at times that many of those coaches never got terribly good at hiring from a large pool of candidates. Look at what happened to Kelly after he left, he may have finally put together a good staff by his last year at UCLA. Lanning has done an incredible job in his hires and Cristobal did a good job hiring good people on paper but that never really came together in practice. I look forward to writing on those two coaches and their methods more in the weeks to come.