Dan Lanning spent Monday refusing to guarantee anyone at Oregon anything. The quarterback job is open. The offensive line is in competition, and so are some defensive spots. The person calling plays Saturday might not be the person who called them against UCLA.
“Everything is being evaluated,” Lanning said. That is a striking sentence from a coach whose team opened the season ranked No. 2 in the country and now sits at 3-2, out of the AP poll entirely.
The quarterback room got here by subtraction
Dante Moore suffered a concussion against USC, did side work before the UCLA game, and has no firm timetable. That single injury explains most of Oregon’s October.
Dylan Raiola, the Nebraska transfer who started two seasons there, went 6-of-19 for 43 yards against UCLA with two interceptions and a lost fumble before Lanning pulled him in the second half. Lanning made a point of noting Raiola “played really well against USC,” which is true and also a week old.
Brock Thomas replaced him and threw for 149 yards and a touchdown. Thomas did not win the game, but he was the only Oregon quarterback who moved the ball Saturday, and that is usually how a competition gets opened.
Lanning’s framing of what he is weighing: “[Saturday’s performance] all plays into effect, and the body of work this week all plays into effect.” Translation: practice decides it, and he is not announcing anything early.
He went straight at the turnovers, too. “But you have to be able to protect the ball, that’s a part of it,” he said. Three giveaways from the quarterback position in under three quarters is the kind of number that ends a job without anybody having to say the words.
The play-calling threat is the bigger story
Lanning said the play-caller could change Saturday and would not say who would take it over. He said game planning this week will be “more collaborative.” He also said he still backs first-year offensive coordinator Drew Mehringer.
Those three statements fit together exactly one way: Mehringer keeps the title and may lose the headset. No coach floats a play-calling change in the middle of October unless he has already spent real time thinking about it.
I would not do it. Changing the voice in the quarterback’s ear during the same week you change the quarterback is how a 3-2 season turns into a 6-6 season. Oregon’s issue against UCLA was ball security and a passer who could not complete anything, and handing the script to somebody new on a Wednesday does not address either one.
Nebraska, of all teams, is next
Oregon hosts Nebraska on Saturday, Raiola’s former program. If he starts, everyone gets the story they want. If he does not, the fact that Lanning chose someone else for that specific game tells you plenty about what the staff saw on film.
Either way, the Ducks are five games into a season that began with playoff expectations and are now holding open auditions across multiple position groups. Lanning has built a roster good enough to fix one of these problems in a week. Fixing the quarterback, the play-calling and the offensive line all at once, with Nebraska in town, is a lot to ask, and the honest answer is that he probably cannot.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.