MikeJ

Here is what I was looking at (after seeing these same numbers reported elsewhere): NIL Collectives – Power 5 Schools – NCAA Revenue Sharing & NIL Estimates 2025 NIL-NCAA.COM I can't vouch for their accuracy. If anyone has seen a different ranking or estimate I'd be interested in seeing it.

I know, it's frustrating, especially when in reality we only rank 19th in NIL spending at $10.5 million compared to over $20m for tOSU and others. If we want to spend even in the ballpark of those schools, we have loads of budget room to lure players like this.

Nice post. Another comparison point which looks bad for us right now is NIL spending. NIL gets spent on players who were not only blue chip recruits out of high school, but who have proven to be great players at the college level, so I would argue it makes an even bigger difference. I think we need to flat out spend more on NIL. I never used to think this way, we have 'done more with less' for many years. But if my understanding of where Oregon ranks is correct (someone correct me if I'm wrong), we rank #19 nationally in NIL spending, and while we spent about $11m this year, Texas, Ohio State and a few others spent north of $20m. That's a massive difference. We're way behind Michigan, and behind even Indiana and Mich. State in NIL spending. It's starting to look, at least to me, like we can't field a roster that is strong enough from top to bottom to bring ourselves into parity with teams like Ohio State unless we spend NIL money that is at least in the same ballpark as other top teams. Being ranked 19th in such spending (that is among public universities only, we're likely lower than that if private schools are included), and being outspent nearly 2-to-1, appears to be a serious handicap. I'm not saying it should be this way, and maybe some kind of NIL spending caps will be put into place, but for now I don't think this can be ignored. Everyone who doesn't do the research assumes Oregon is a big NIL spender due to the Nike connection, etc., and maybe we need to do a bit more along those lines.

Very interesting article. Evan Stewart being unavailable made the problem of Ohio State taking away our crossing patterns worse, weakening the deep threat that you would hope would open up. But the most interesting point looking forward is the one about Dante Moore and Lanning using only 5th-year-plus transfer QBs so far. It has been pretty glaring to me the last several years that Oregon has basically ignored giving their backup QBs any playing time, even in blowout wins. There is reason to believe, and hope, that Dante will come along fine next year (he's started previously at UCLA and has gotten rave reviews from Tez, etc.), but I'd feel better if he'd gotten in there a bit this year. Thinking back over the years, we definitely did more to get next-in-line QBs some game time vs. having them remain untested question marks.

It's a great, tough matchup. What concerns me more than the talent/coaching questions is the long layoff (3.5 weeks) and possibly coming out flat/slow in the first half. Not sure what Lanning can do about it, possibly some intense scrimmages, etc. to stay sharp. That's one disadvantage of the 1st round bye.

That 'S-E-C' chant from the Ohio St crowd is really loud.

Yeah, Ohio St and Oregon look like the top 2 teams in the country. Tennessee doesn't look like it belongs on the same field with Ohio St.

This is just complete domination.

GeoTechDuck and Solar, Josh Pate on his show today was making your same point about the interesting comparison between Oregon's likely opponents as the #1 seed vs #5.

They have a great defense. Take a look at points allowed vs our common opponents. But they haven't faced an opponent as complete as Oregon (except possibly in the game they lost).

Nice to see Moore put a TD drive together. He looked happy.

I've been surprised this year with how deep this team is overall that having a few people out injured just makes us massively worse. Everyone has injuries piling up by week 11. When we're near 100% healthy we're unstoppable, but a few players short of that and the wheels seem to just come off.

Agree we need to lean on the run before we potentially get behind here.

Boy does Gabriel look out of sorts today. Bad throws, bad decisions, kindof deer in the headlights looking right now.

Attended Oregon from '86 to '90 and saw lots of Frog and his joke book. RIP Frog.