After two weeks of going head-to-head each day in fall camp, Oregon’s players finally get to focus on facing an opponent instead of competing against one another.
Oregon offensive coordinator Matt Lubick said the Ducks’ players are playing with even more energy now that it’s game week. With Oregon’s season-opener against UC Davis just four days away, Lubick said that Oregon’s coaching staff doesn’t plan to pare down the offense despite being heavily favored for Saturday’s matchup.
“It doesn’t necessarily matter about the opponent,” Lubick told reporters after Wednesday’s practice. “What we do is we have an offensive package and we’ll study our opponent and see what works against it. So — this is an estimate — it’s probably about 25% of our offense. And that changes each week.”
Lubick also said that the Ducks plan to rotate six or seven players at the wide receiver position this week. Freshman standout Dillon Mitchell wasn’t listed on Oregon’s two-deep depth chart that was released last week due to injury, but the Ducks still have six returning players at the position. Lubick said that Charles Nelson will get subbed a lot throughout the rotation at the slot position and that he considers Darren Carrington, Jalen Brown, Devon Allen and Dwayne Stanford all ‘guys who could start.’
Taj Griffin and Tony Brooks-James will still primarily lineup at the running back spot, but will also play certain sets at slot receiver.
The Ducks’ offense spent much of their fall camp working through ‘install’ periods and adding to the playbook as camp went on. The same goes for Oregon’s defense. First-year defensive coordinator Brady Hoke implemented a 4-3 defense that is foreign to many of Oregon’s veteran players who spent years playing in a 3-4 scheme. Several players throughout fall camp have spoken of the difficult transition of adapting to a new scheme, but it sounds like Hoke has reached the end of the install period for the time being as week one approaches.
“I think we’re kind of at a point where we feel pretty comfortable with everything that’s going in,” Oregon linebacker Johnny Ragin III said. “I think we might put stuff in here and there to gameplan, but we want to really just prefect the things we have right now and then from time-to-time, just put things in due to need rather than expectation.”
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