There was never going to be much trouble finding things to write about with Oregon’s defense this fall.
The four returning veterans along the defensive front gave us an obvious starting point before the first practice. Chris Hampton had an entire list of things he wanted improved from last season, especially sacks, tackles for loss and red-zone defense. The secondary had enough new pieces that almost every interview created another depth-chart question, and linebacker was trying to replace Bryce Boettcher without pretending one player could simply become Bryce Boettcher.
Then practice started and the defensive stories kept coming.
By the time I finished the first few reports, I had the same problem I described when we went back through the offensive notebook. There was simply too much useful material to fit into the story I was writing that day. Some answers were saved because another topic had taken over the report, while others became more interesting after we heard something similar from another player two weeks later.
This is the second trip back through that material. As with the offensive version, the direct quotes here are the things that did not make our previous practice reports. Some go all the way back to Media Day, and a few are the kind of answers I had almost forgotten until I started working back through the interviews.
The defensive notebook was especially interesting because so much of the outside conversation has centered on how good this group might be. That is understandable. Oregon has NFL talent across the front, a linebacker room I think may ultimately be better than it was a year ago despite losing Boettcher, and a secondary with enough legitimate options that figuring out who does not play may be harder than figuring out who can.
The unused answers do not make me less interested in the stars. They made me spend more time thinking about everybody around them.
Matayo was already talking about the guys we had not seen
Matayo Uiagalelei sat down at Media Day with every reason to talk about the four familiar names returning along Oregon’s defensive line. He was one of them, and much of the offseason discussion had centered on what it meant for Oregon to get so much proven talent back instead of watching those players leave for the NFL.
Uiagalelei almost immediately moved the conversation somewhere else.
“We got the whole D-line coming back, but we also got people that y’all ain’t seen before,” Uiagalelei said.
He started naming them when he was asked what it is like to play on a front where an offense cannot simply decide to double one player. Nasir Wyatt came up. So did Aydin Breland and Matthew Johnson.
“You might want to double someone, but it’s kind of like pick your poison,” Uiagalelei said. “We got guys like Nasir Wyatt who are going to come in and wreak havoc. We got guys like Aydin Breland, Matt Johnson.”
We spent plenty of time on those players later in camp, but I had forgotten how early Uiagalelei put Johnson in that conversation.
The stars of this defensive front are not hard to identify. The more important August question was whether Oregon actually had another wave behind them or whether the depth looked better on a roster than it would once those players had to take meaningful snaps.
Johnson kept coming up.
A’Mauri Washington had been asked at Media Day when he knew Johnson could become a real player for Oregon. His answer was basically that the games had very little to do with the discovery.
“Everybody that we see in the game that do stuff in the game, I would have already seen it in practice,” Washington said. “You have to do it in practice.”
Washington remembered watching Johnson work before most people outside the program knew much about him. He did not know when the opportunity would arrive, but he was convinced the work was going to show up when it did.
A few practices later, Johnson got his own chance to explain what had changed.
Matthew Johnson is trying to get to the point where he does not have to think
Johnson played enough as a true freshman to learn what college football felt like, but some of the experience he valued most did not come from his actual snaps. He traveled to every game, stood in those environments and watched older defensive linemen go through the process of preparing and playing.
He also watched the players in his own room.
Johnson said praise from older teammates such as Washington and Bear Alexander meant something because those were players he had watched before he ever became their teammate. Once he arrived at Oregon, he started looking at what they did well and trying to work pieces of it into his own game.
The result he wanted from all of that was surprisingly simple.
“When you know what you’re doing and you kind of know what to expect, you’re able to go out there and just react instead of think,” Johnson said. “You just kind of know what to do.”
I like that description because it is easy to get distracted by what Johnson looks like physically.
He arrived at Oregon around 265 pounds. During his interview in camp, he said he was about 312 and had been as high as 320 during the offseason. He also casually confirmed that he had squatted 815 pounds while Washington was putting 855 on the bar.
Those are fun numbers, and they help explain why Oregon believes Johnson can hold up inside. Johnson sounded much more interested in everything he still did not know.
“I personally try and come in every day looking for a new thing to get better at, and I’m constantly critiquing myself,” Johnson said. “I don’t feel like there’s any part of my game that is 100% polished yet.”
That does not sound like somebody waiting behind four seniors and assuming his turn starts next year. It sounds like a player trying to remove the hesitation between recognizing something and reacting to it.
By the end of camp, Johnson had been talked about enough that he was hardly a hidden name anymore. Going back to his own interview helps explain why the coaches were becoming comfortable putting him into that next group.
The physical transformation made him harder to move. The football growth is what could make him harder to keep off the field.
Linebacker never sounded like a room trying to replace Bryce Boettcher with another Bryce Boettcher
Linebacker was probably the defensive position I changed my mind about the most over the course of the offseason.
Losing Boettcher mattered. There is no sensible way to talk around that. He gave Oregon production, experience, leadership and an unusual ability to arrive at the football with bad intentions.
Jeffrey Bassa was already gone from the previous year, which meant another familiar voice in the middle of the defense had disappeared. The obvious question was whether Jerry Mixon and Devon Jackson could replace what Oregon had lost.
The more I listened to them, the less interested I became in the word replace.
Mixon was asked about it at Media Day after spending two years waiting for his own opportunity and then producing when it finally came. His next step, he said, was “leading the defense, communicating more, and getting everybody aligned around me.”
That sounds like part of what Boettcher provided, but Mixon did not talk as though he needed to copy him. Asked later how he balances learning from Boettcher with remaining himself, Mixon had a better answer.
“Just pull stuff from his game that he was really good at and then equal him out with my game,” Mixon said.
There is probably more wisdom in that than trying to manufacture a replacement.
Mixon can take the communication, preparation or physical habits that made Boettcher effective without pretending he has the same body, personality or game. Oregon does not need a Bryce Boettcher impersonator. It needs Mixon to become a better Mixon.
His description of the linebacker room’s daily standard was even shorter.
“Just prove it every day,” Mixon said. “Always talking about you versus you, so prove it every day.”
Devon Jackson sounded almost identical when the conversation turned toward leadership.
“I don’t really got to step up,” Jackson said. “All I got to do is just be me. My teammates going to respect me for me.”
Jackson’s point was not that leadership does not matter. It was that trying to suddenly act like somebody else because Oregon needed another leader would probably make him less convincing, not more.
That answer stayed with me because Jackson is a very different player than Boettcher.
The speed is obvious. Lanning joked during camp about one of the numbers attributed to Jackson being a little inflated, then essentially followed the correction by saying there still might not be a faster linebacker in college football. Jackson knows that athleticism is part of what makes him different, and at Media Day he sounded ready to stop thinking so much about what the position was supposed to look like.
When the conversation turned toward the pressure on Oregon’s linebackers to hold up their part of what could be an excellent defense, Jackson did not sound especially concerned about expectations coming from outside the building.
“The outside noise doesn’t make the pressure,” Jackson said. “We make the pressure.”
He then ran through a lineage of Oregon linebackers he has watched, from Noah Sewell through Bassa and Boettcher, before adding that he hoped he and Mixon could be next.
Jackson was also asked where his game had changed most since he first arrived at Oregon. He could have talked about size, speed or scheme, but he went somewhere more basic.
“Honestly, just trusting myself,” Jackson said. “I got to be the most physical version of me every day.”
Then he took the thought another step, saying aggression and maximum effort toward the football can solve a lot of problems.
I came out of camp feeling better about this linebacker room than I did going into it. That is not because Oregon found another Boettcher. It is because the Ducks may not need to.
Mixon has waited long enough to know what his own game looks like. Jackson has the athletic profile to change what Hampton can ask from the position, and the rest of the room spent August getting enough work that Oregon may have more playable answers behind them than it had a year ago.
[PAYWALL HERE]
Trey McNutt spent most of last season taking reps nobody could see
Trey McNutt may be the strangest player to evaluate in Oregon’s secondary because almost everything interesting about him begins with what we did not get to watch.
His first fall camp was cut short by a broken leg. While other freshmen from his class were beginning to establish themselves during the season, McNutt was watching.
That could have become a lost year.
McNutt did not describe it that way when he finally got a full fall camp this August. He said the injury forced him toward the mental side of football because there were no physical repetitions available to him.
“After the injury, I was just focused on my mental, focused on mentally getting strong and learning the plays and learning the defense, schemes of offenses and stuff like that,” McNutt said.
Those repetitions did not happen on the field, but they started making the real ones easier when he came back.
“I got mental reps last year and being able to put it to the field and really get those true reps on the field has been good,” McNutt said. “I’ve been able to play faster.”
There is a pretty good parallel between that answer and what Johnson told us about playing without having to think first.
McNutt spent his injury year watching Dillon Thieneman, and the things he remembered were not interceptions or tackles. He remembered Thieneman taking notes, being in the facility and following the same routine through fall camp.
“Learning the small, the little details really is what I’ve taken out of it, being around these older guys,” McNutt said.
He was also doing extra work with the younger defensive backs. McNutt said he, Brandon Finney and others were getting time together outside the facility and staying after practice.
“We all are becoming like little technicians with our craft,” McNutt said.
That phrase probably tells us more about where McNutt is now than anything we could write from his recruiting ranking.
He still has to turn the missed season into actual production, and Oregon has too many good defensive backs to hand anybody a role because of what recruiting services thought two years ago. McNutt seems to understand that.
When he was asked where he could play, he did not narrow the answer much.
“Really wherever the coaches see me best at, whether there’s special teams, safety, dime, anywhere,” McNutt said.
That also gives us a little special-teams context that got squeezed out when most of our August specialist coverage centered on kicker, punter and the return jobs. Some of the most important special-teams decisions will involve defenders like McNutt who are talented enough to help somewhere else but still need to earn a larger role.
For him, a special-teams snap would not be a consolation prize. It could be the first piece of a role that did not get a chance to exist last season.
Koi Perich came to Oregon partly because he did not want to be comfortable
Koi Perich gave one of my favorite unused Media Day answers, and it had almost nothing to do with safety.
Leaving Minnesota meant leaving home for the first time. Perich grew up there, became a star there and could have stayed in a place where almost everything around him was familiar.
He said part of the reason for leaving was that he wanted the opposite.
“I wanted to be uncomfortable,” Perich said. “That’s something I wanted to do in my process. I knew that was a big opportunity that I needed to do. Obviously, you can’t be great unless you’re uncomfortable.”
A few minutes later, someone asked whether he had started feeling more comfortable at Oregon.
Perich rejected the premise.
“I would say I’m not comfortable,” he said. “I think being uncomfortable is the best position to be.”
He was talking about continuing to learn the playbook, improve his body and use the remaining weeks before the season to make another jump.
I probably overlooked those answers originally because there were more obvious football questions around Perich.
Where would he play? How would Hampton use him differently than Thieneman? Would he return punts? Could he move around? How quickly would his experience at Minnesota translate into Oregon’s defense?
Those are still reasonable questions.
The uncomfortable answer helps explain why the adjustment never seemed to bother him much.
Perich arrived as an experienced Big Ten player and immediately stepped into a secondary where other players knew Oregon’s system better than he did. He said everybody was trying to learn something from everybody else, whether that meant someone taking something from his game or Perich learning from Aaron Flowers and the players who had spent several years in Eugene.
He also liked the way the younger defensive backs were pushing the room.
“They don’t really show that they’re young guys,” Perich said. “They can push the older guys, and the older guys can push the younger guys, and ultimately help the whole team.”
That is where this secondary becomes difficult to project neatly.
Finney is not a young prospect anymore in the way we talked about him a year ago. He has already shown he can play. Flowers has been in the program for years, Perich has Big Ten experience somewhere else and McNutt finally has a healthy opportunity to show what all those mental repetitions created.
Then there is another group pushing behind and around them.
Depth charts make that look clean. Camp rarely does.
Tank Jones may be most useful because he stopped worrying about what to call him
Anthony “Tank” Jones is another player I kept coming back to while going through the unused material.
He arrived at Oregon looking like one kind of defender and kept getting bigger. By this camp, coaches were talking about him around 300 pounds and using him across the defensive front.
Kam Araghi liked the physical development. What seemed to impress him more was Jones’ willingness to let the coaches decide where that body belonged.
Araghi said some edge rushers become attached to the position because that is how they see themselves. They want to rush from outside and do not necessarily want to hear that their changing body might create more value somewhere else.
Jones did not respond that way.
“I want to do what’s best for the team and where you guys think is the best spot for me to be able to go produce,” Araghi recalled Jones telling the coaches.
Araghi believed Jones had become twitchy and quick enough to retain value outside while developing enough strength and power to handle work inside. In his mind, the willingness to do both increased Jones’ chance of getting into the rotation rather than limiting it.
The size itself is interesting. The attitude toward the size is probably more important.
Oregon has spent several years recruiting defensive linemen whose bodies do not force Hampton into one answer. A player who can move from the edge to the interior can change a front without Oregon having to substitute, but only if the player actually understands and accepts the work that comes with both jobs.
Jones appears to have leaned into it.
By the middle of camp, Uiagalelei said Jones was getting an enormous number of repetitions and being asked to handle a lot.
“He’s just killing it, man,” Uiagalelei said. “I feel like we’re throwing a lot of stuff at him and he’s just killing it, improving every day.”
Uiagalelei said Oregon could use Jones at multiple spots across the line while still taking advantage of his athleticism.
There is no reason to turn that into a prediction that Jones suddenly becomes one of Oregon’s biggest statistical stars. The more interesting possibility is that he becomes one of those players who makes the defensive front harder to solve because the offense cannot tell exactly what Oregon is doing simply by seeing who jogged onto the field.
Bleu Dantzler took a different route into the same conversation
Bleu Dantzler had one of the more unusual paths into this defense.
He spent his freshman season at Oregon State, entered the portal after a coaching change and heard from Araghi almost immediately. The connection actually went back farther than that because Oregon had evaluated Dantzler in high school and even had him at a camp.
It just had not worked the first time.
Dantzler remembered that Oregon camp because he was asked to play inside linebacker when he had much more experience as an edge player. He freely admitted it was not his best showing.
By the time Oregon got another chance to evaluate him through the portal, the fit made more sense.
Dantzler said the standard changed once he arrived in Eugene, but he liked that part of the move.
“I hold myself to a high standard, so I think coming here and having coaches that were going to hold me to that high of a standard as well was a perfect match,” Dantzler said.
The part of his game that improved most was not the pass rush that initially made him interesting.
Dantzler talked about working in space and learning to function as a true outside linebacker, including coverage responsibilities he had not handled much in high school. His natural pass-rush ability remained part of what he could give Oregon, but the run game and coverage work were becoming just as important.
That made Dantzler another example of why I stopped thinking about this defensive front as a clean split between starters and backups.
Some players are going to rush the passer. Some are going to set edges. Some can move inside. Some can drop. A few may do enough of everything that the label next to their name matters considerably less than the package Hampton wants to use.
Dantzler is still young and still learning. He also already knows that being able to rush the passer is not enough to get onto the field as often as he wants.
The most human defensive-line story involved a card game and three dinners
The defensive-line conversation got pretty serious during camp.
There was NFL talent, pass-rush improvement, run defense, body transformations, position versatility and questions about how Oregon could possibly get enough repetitions for everybody. Even the younger players were being evaluated against the standard created by a group that has played a lot of college football.
Then Tony Tuioti started talking about Nertz.
I had to go back through the interview because I remembered the card-game conversation but had forgotten how much better the answer became once Tuioti stopped talking about the game itself.
Nertz is essentially a competitive form of solitaire played with several people. Tuioti said the defensive linemen had gotten into it, which was hardly surprising for a room where competition seems capable of finding its way into almost anything.
The more interesting part was where they were playing.
“Anybody that shows up to the Tuioti household, if you don’t know how to play cards, you’re going to learn how to play cards,” Tuioti said. “You’re going to learn how to play dominoes.”
His home has become an extension of the defensive-line room. Players stop by regularly, some have had the garage and front-door codes for years, and Tuioti said he likes knowing they have somewhere away from the facility where they can simply hang out.
Sometimes that creates another problem.
“If they’re hungry, there’s times I’ve made three dinners at one point at night,” Tuioti said.
He was not complaining. Tuioti has seven children, with only his youngest still at home, and he talked about how quickly the different phases of life disappear if you do not notice them while they are happening.
This particular phase includes one of the most talented defensive fronts Oregon has put together, several seniors who chose to come back and younger players trying to earn their place beside them.
“You got to enjoy all the phases,” Tuioti said. “I’m definitely enjoying this phase here with these guys right now.”
I had not planned on ending up there when I started going back through the defensive notebook.
I thought the unused material would probably give us another story about sacks, depth and how many future NFL players Oregon might have on the field at once. There is some of that here because it is impossible to talk honestly about this defense without acknowledging the talent.
The notes I liked most were a little different.
Matthew Johnson wants to reach the point where he can react instead of think. Mixon wants to take pieces of Boettcher’s game without trying to become him, while Jackson sees no reason to manufacture a different version of himself just because his role is larger. McNutt spent an injury year taking mental repetitions, and Perich moved halfway across the country partly because being uncomfortable sounded better than staying comfortable.
Jones grew into a different body and decided the position label did not matter much. Dantzler arrived from Oregon State and started learning parts of outside linebacker that had little to do with the pass rush that first got people’s attention.
Then some of them go to Tuioti’s house and play cards.
That does not tell us how many sacks Oregon will have this season or whether this defense will be as good as people expect. Camp never really gives us those answers, no matter how badly we want August to predict what will happen in November.
It does give us a better idea of what Oregon is working with.
There are obvious stars on this defense, and there should be. The reason I came away from the notebook even more interested in the group was how many of the unused conversations involved somebody else.
That seems like a pretty good problem for Hampton to take into the season.