David Marsh

BOTH Frost and Kelly have approached Helfrich with interest in hiring him. He said no to both of them. At this point I get the feeling Helfrich is happy with his millions and spending time with his family and pursuing other things in life. I know he has appeared as an analyst a few times for a variety of games. The demands of the college game these days are more intense than ever and I don't know if Helfrich wants it bad enough for those stresses. Let's be completely honest here... if Helfrich wanted to return to the college game any Group of Five program and many Power Five programs would jump at the opportunity. His record at Oregon was 37-16. That is a solid winning record. And for the record his recruiting was not outside the norm for Oregon at the time. A Defense of Helfrich's Recruiting Legacy FISHDUCK.COM Mark Helfrich is generally considered the worst recruiter in modern Oregon football history. He is a coach who oversaw some of... That staff of veteran coaches did get caught out by the new social media recruiting trends which hurt them. But I also get the sense that Helfrich does not want to dive back into the college game because of the recruiting aspect. That alone eats up the majority of coaches' time and back to my earlier point, I think he really likes having time to spend with his family and that outweighs his desire to return to coaching.

Cardwell actually reminds me a lot of Tyner, when Tyner was healthy. Decent size but is shifty and can have a good burst of speed.

Dollars and Cardwell can do a lot.. neither are bruisers though, though Cardwell is built more for it than Dollars. Irving did have the most rush yards against EWU. He is really a traditional back of just handing him the ball. I has not been good at catching the ball when thrown the ball right at him. But he has the power. Whittington is interesting... He has had some very good plays and he can squeeze through some holes. He also had a few nice cuts. I feel Whittington and Dollars are similar in their function and Cardwell and Irving are similar in their potential usues. However, Cardwell is potentially more versatile as he has much much better hands. Irving is a thumper though and sometimes you just need to punish the opposition. Anyone else notice how many more stiffarms are being used overall?

Nebraska is so close to being less bad and actually winning games. I think Frost has this season to get to the bowl game. It still can be done but is growing less likely. If they are going to fire Frost mid season it will happen Monday... I guess there is nothing hard and fast about that rule but if the Nebraska higher ups delay they are only making themselves look incompetent. Otherwise they ride out the season. But the big question is who do the replace Frost with this year if they opt to fire him now? I find it doubtful whoever they have will do any better. These losses are on score and he can't figure out how to not-lose properly... By actually not losing. I think Frost is probably gone at the end of the season at the very least. Unless there is miraculous turnaround, but that feels unlikely. The players haven't been buying into the culture fully. I guess they are too busy vomiting from their new offensive line coaches workout routine.

As long as we see the team we saw yesterday against EWU I feelt confident. That team was focused and played well. Not perfectly by any means but they tackled well and there weren't a whole lot of blatantly missed assignments from the starting defense.. The offense was also calm and collected. It helps when playing with a lead but they never looked under control against Georgia.

Lanning will not be defined by Oregon's loss to Georgia certainly. But I do feel that Oregon's loss to Georgia will become a foundation for Lanning's culture because it becomes the why to Lanning's culture. The loss shows what happens if you don't fully buy in and the players really took that to heart. Eastern Washington isn't a bad FCS program by any means. I think everyone expected them to score at least twnety points and against our starters they only managed seven, and that came off of an explosive kick return and a targeting penalty to set them up. Oregon dominated that game, there wasn't a question as to whether Oregon was going to win but I don't think anyone expected Oregon to dominate the game as much as they did. The offense was calm and collected. Though I wish they wouldn't use those jet sweep like plays that seemed to always result in negative yards. The defense followed their assignments and the front seven got some incredible push and forced the QB to pass earlier than he would have liked which led to some errant throws. Special teams look better than the Cristobal era but I wouldn't call them special just yet. But how about Lewis actually kicking the ball into the end zone this year! Amazing what can happen when you actually coach special teams than just leave them on their own to practice, basically what I heard from the Cristobal era on special teams.

So far... Irving is a thumper at runningback and he can take some hits and keep on trucking. But he is not good catching balls out of the backfield. Cardwell has some solid vision and can bob and wave through a crowd. He also a real threat in the recievers game.

17-14 as a score feels like a curse for the favored team today.

Furgusion made that horrible pass look good. But still... Bad Bo... Don't force that pass!

This may be the beginning of the end of Saban. Last year he was undefeated against his former assistant coaches... He lost two games to his former assistants last year (Fisher and Smart). And it is looking like another one of his assistants might take another one. Texas fans would be feeling pretty good about their SEC move if they win this one.

Cristobal is VERY VERY GOOD in the offseason. Cristobal Has Spoiled Fans By Winning the Off-Season FISHDUCK.COM Mario Cristobal will be Oregon's head coach in 2022. The only way this doesn't happen is if he opts to leave for another program... He hires incredible offensive and defensive coordinators and he is a monster recruiter... but we have yet to see a team come together that is truly great. I get what that Miami fan was feeling.... Cristobal makes you feel anything is possible with every off-season but in-season is a completely different story.

So... Business as usual for Cristobal then.

It also gives you a real sense of how much talent Georgia has. Because coming in at one in the SEC also implies coming in at one overall and Georgia has done it twice on that list. Granted the majority of their 2018 star power is probably gone... But still. That's the kind of talent Oregon needs.

I think this comes with the quarterback, assuming it's Nix, is also calm and comfortable. We were hit with being behind desperation that makes everything worse. Nix has had some great heiro ball moments in his career but when he tries to play hero ball it's what gets him into trouble. Same went for Brown last year. Need to get points on the board and find that rhythm. I think it Oregon is playing either ahead or ateast not behind we will see a calmer team that just executes better. The rushing offense did pretty good last week but it didn't have time to really develop.

Oh the quality of the last recruiting class was good. The problem is the lack of many recruits this recruiting class. However, the transfer portal changes everything when it comes to recruiting as well. So if Oregon can get a few quality pieces at offensive line then go transfer portal shopping.

The funny thing is that this year has been real tough to land offensive linemen. Need that to turn around for us as well.

This is NIL I can get behind. This also feels like the most natural version of NIL.

I want to see our Defensive front seven get pressure on the Quarterback. There were quite a few plays last week where they were getting close to the Georgia QB and if they just had a little more time they would have got him. So also looking for the back end of the defense to hold up a bit longer. I would love to see the secondary maintain coverage for a long enough period of time that the quarterback actually feels pressure. This has been a problem since last year for Oregon's defense and I really want to see it corrected.

Absolutely agree but the problem was that KD lost patience or Nix lost patience. We should have had 14 more points than we did at least because if we were patient we would have gotten the yards. I feel Nix's pass on the last offensive play of the game was foolish, if Oregon ran the ball they could have probably gotten those two yards. Putting the ball in the air there against a team that had shut down the passing game didn't seem like a good idea.

I don't think a bunch of the players were embracing that mentality until last week's beat down.

I think the coverage against Georgia may have been deliberately a bit softer underneath. I think some of the goal was to bend but don't break against Georgia, now that obviously didn't work. But I do feel there may have been some fear of getting beat over the top and by having the safeties so far back at the snap that they wanted to prevent this. On the whole Georgia didn't go over the top on Oregon's defense, they had to score in the red zone. Now Georgia did that just fine which hurts. But what I will be curious to see is if there is some more physical coverage closer to the line of scrimmage this week when there isn't a clear talent advantage on the opposing offense at receiver. I'll be more concerned this week if we see soft coverage underneath again this week.

Not going to lie... I'm pumping some sunshine this week. But I also feel that the season is no where near over and anything can happen. We have BYU next week which will be an early test. Then we have Washington State which is a good time of year for that game being early fall and they didn't look terribly great against Idaho. So by the time we hit perhaps the meat of our schedule the players have been tested and are hardened vets. To get to the Rose Bowl does not require winning all the non-conference games but it will require winning the conference. And right now we can still win the conference. I get the feeling this coaching staff doesn't like to sit still for too long and they are working hard at fixing all the problems they can. Eastern Washington this week will be interesting to see just the coaches have managed to fix in a week.

And we all know coaches are working on tackling this week and players are working on tackling this week. Biggest problem with football is how to teach and practice tackling. Coaches don't want to injure players so keeping tackling to a minimum tends to be the goal. If Oregon was playing touch football that defense would have done a much much better job. Sadly this isn't touch football and contact alone doesn't count.

I feel the talent we have needed a wake up call more than anything else. Sure we beat Ohio State last year and that was a big deal. But Ohio State's defense last year was soft and awful. Georgia was a better program than Ohio State last year and is probably a better program than Ohio State this year. Complacency has seeped into the program. The losses to Utah and Oklahoma last year can be easily excused away by a variety of factors, injuries, coaching changes and whatever else out there. Additionally... Lanning wants to de-recruit his players. Those stars don't mean anything anymore as they have to earn everything they want out of the college game. That part of his culture just got a major lift because our players got smacked by Georgia hard. By the sound of it yesterday with the first practice after the game, players have taken that to heart and are working harder in practice now. The talent we have needs to buy in and learn the culture and sometimes it takes a really awful defeat to get them on board.

The game was harder for us than practice” and they went about correcting that today. this quote is super important. This is a building the future culture quote. The players now know what they need to do. It's one of those things that you can be told but don't really understand until you expirence it in a bad way. I think this loss may be the most important loss in Lanning's career at Oregon. This is when his culture will start to take hold. the current players will practice and play better. And they will pass it on to next year's players and so on.