Oregon Ducks Football: Offensive Line Projections and Grades | Addicted To Quack

Hmmmmm. Big and Beefy Trench Monsters. No doubt it will take the offensive line 2-3 games to gel and establish communication on a rebuilt offensive line. The talent level of these players will help hide any early season....shortcomings. But by the time we trip out to Happy Valley I have confidence that Coach Terry and company will have them ballin at an elite and dominating level of play. Remember that not only this coaching staff, but NFL-lite coaches across the country are still adapting and adjusting to high player turnover due to the wild, wild West of the transfer portal. (Well except Clemson maybe...lol).

No matter where you get your players from and how you tend to utilize them in your football scheme, they still need to learn how to work as a "team" to maximize their inherent abilities to the fullest potential. Thats where the "coaching" comes into play. I believe that both our offensive and defensive line play may actually surprise a lot of sports pundits as the season progresses. But then again...I'm just a hopelessly devoted fan(atic) of OBD so what the hell do I know, Not filtered through that fandom!

🤪. Go Ducks!

I am going to use this string because it is calling all stat geeks and that is what my comment pertains to. Because I am like the rest of you, waiting for Saturday with not much else to do, I did a little stat diving.

I was looking at Team Talent Composite since they started keeping this statistic in 2015. I know by picking 2024 & 2025 to compare to the other 9 years that I am using a small data sample but its fun.

Remember this is Team Talent Composite rankings

From 2015-2023 the average difference between the the #1 team and the #20 team was 230 points; 2024 & 2025 it was 193 Points

From 2015-2023 the average difference between the the #1 team and the #10 team was 138 points; 2024 & 2025 it was 99 Points

From 2015-2023 the average difference between the the #1 team and the #4 team was 73 points; 2024 & 2025 it was 42 Points

So has the portal/NIL leveled the playing field or is this just a 2 year blip? Your thoughts?

Overall, I tend to enjoy the detail from the two guys over at ATQ. First of all, they tend to provide video to support their observations; and, that allows one to decide for themselves their level of agreement. Second, they seem to take care in collecting data and comparing it with historical numbers and trends.

However, I sometimes feel they get a bit too into their own data and how they apply it. They have been pretty pessimistic about the 2025 Duck OL (and World in particular). I think in another recent article they suggested the best possible use of World (this single year the Ducks have him) would be for him to sit out the season and use it to get additional time learning the Duck system (to lessen their "transfer effect"), and adding more muscle (his "anchoring issues"), and to instead have him start playing in late December for the playoffs.

Instead they suggest using rSO Genorris Wilson at LT (who I had hoped we would have heard more about in fall camp but that has been pretty quiet), who has I guess graded out ok so far; but, with only 50 career (mostly) garbage time snaps since high school, what does that really mean? The article even suggests it might be fair to pencil him in as "about an average FBS LT if thrown in this year" Wait, we know that exactly how? Did the coaches know that when they went out and got two portal OT?

I appreciate having the guts to throw out such predictions if one really believes it (who knows maybe the OL will be the huge topic of conversation the first month of the season or longer); but, I'll have to go with the coaches and their evaluations on this one -- which by almost all accounts seem to an OL plan they are cautiously optimistic about that includes World -- rather than ATQ data.

Geoff Schwartz also did a pretty deep film dive on World and seemed to think most of the problems that ATQ dinged World for were correctable. I am comfortable saying Geoff knows some OL.

Further, I'm willing to give World a bump for not having to play for a Nevada team, 7-30 during his time there (getting regularly blasted in the Mountain West by the likes of Air Force, Utah State, and Hawaii). It wouldn't surprise me to see a guy lose a bit of focus, have a few bad reps, and be at times possibly a bit frustrated in that environment. The 4-8 Ducks squad in 2016 likely had some good guys put up some at times not so great reps on film getting blasted all season.

Edited 2 hours ago2 hr by AnotherOD

A lot of people have conditioned themselves for our O-Line to have a slow start due to last year.

I think that is a false equivalence. Our slow start last year was due to the center being injured at the last minute and doing a poor job of shuffling the players around to find something that would work.

I expect our OL to be dominate from the start, with missed assignments sprinkle in.

The quote "Lies, damn lies and statistics" is attributed to Mark Twain. One needs to be a bit of a humorist to get an upside out of ATQ's take on the perils that OBD will suffer as a result of having three transfers starting on the O-line.

Pass and block error rates calculated on Excel over an entire season may yield valuable data, but does it take into account position and growth over a season? Is a transfer at center riskier than one at guard or tackle? What about the coaching staff identifying and correcting the root causes of why talented OTs like World or Harkey whiffed so often in certain situations?

I have to assume that the coaching staff has evaluated the potential starters and will choose the best five based on practice and scrimmage situations. Cohesion and acting as one is the critical thing for an O-line and having Poncho as the veteran homegrown anchor should mitigate some of the transfer effect negatives. The miserable up front play that plagued last year's Idaho and Boise St games were identified and corrected by the time Ohio State came to town.

Unless the 2025 version of the OL gets off to the same start, I will remain optimistic in Oregon's front five.

"There are a lot of reasons to suspect that the 2025 Oregon Ducks offensive line will not be as effective as recent units. There are some reasons for optimism though. The staff has shown that if a combination on the line isn’t working, they are willing to make changes. I would not be surprised if we see three transfers play against Montana state, but that they re-shuffle to play only one or two by the time they head to Penn State"

This is the kind of stuff that I'm not crazy about.

It pretty much says, "Well, I guess we don't know as much as the coaches, but, well, we probably do, so at least when they realize we were correct, at least they have shown the willingness to be flexible to do what we knew was best."

Not a huge fan, especially when one side is two guys relying on spreadsheets and the other a highly paid, experienced group of coaches who see the players practice daily. 🫤