Three weeks of Oregon fall camp produced more useful answers than there was room to use. Going back through the interviews after camp, some of the things that got left behind look a little more interesting now.
There is always stuff left in the notebook after a practice report.
Sometimes the answer is good and something else that day is simply better. Sometimes a coach starts talking about a player who has almost nothing to do with the story I thought I was writing. Other times, an answer sits there for two weeks before something else happens that makes me go back and hear it differently.
That happened quite a bit during Oregon’s fall camp. Between Media Day, 17 practices, including two scrimmages and all the interviews surrounding them, there was no realistic way to use everything without turning the daily reports into cleaned-up transcripts. I noticed pretty early in camp that there was going to be far more useful material than I could fit into the daily practice reports. By the time the Practice 1 report was finished, I had already started thinking about what was being left on the cutting-room floor and keeping track of quotes I wanted to come back to once camp was over.
That is really all this is. These are not new interviews, and I am not trying to turn them into some grand conclusion about what Oregon’s offense will be this season. They are things Oregon’s coaches and players told us during camp that never made one of our practice reports, and a few of them make more sense now that we have seen how the rest of August played out.
Drew Mehringer probably gave me the best description of the whole exercise during the first week of camp. He was talking about building an offense rather than going through old notebooks, but the line works for both.
“Every year it’s a new puzzle to figure out,” Mehringer said.
He was answering a question about how Oregon improves on last season, and what I liked about the answer was that he did not treat the 2025 offense as something that simply needed repairs. The personnel is different. Some players who were young a year ago can handle more now, while other players are just beginning to figure out what their jobs might become.
Mehringer said Oregon would obviously look at the things it wanted to improve, but the answer might change with the players available to solve it. “How can we take the personnel that we have to go improve that rather than we just need to fix this problem?” he said. “Because it might be a completely different solution.”
That answer did not really fit the Practice 3 story I was writing at the time. Going back through everything now, it fits quite a few conversations that never made those stories.
Davison and Hill suddenly became the older backs
One of the stranger things about Oregon’s running-back room is how quickly Jordon Davison and Dierre Hill Jr. went from being the young guys everybody was trying to prepare to two of the players being asked to help prepare somebody else.
Neither player went into last season with anything close to the role he eventually earned. By the end of it, Oregon had relied heavily on both, and by Media Day this August they were answering questions about what they could pass along to Tradrian Ball and Brandon Smith.
Davison talked about Noah Whittington and the older backs who had helped him when he was trying to figure everything out a year ago. Now Davison saw himself doing some of the same work.
“Just being in their shoes last year, helping with the younger guys and helping get them up to speed and giving them advice on things that helped me last season,” Davison said. “Just trying to be a good role model just like Noah was for me and all the older guys in the room that helped me along the way. So I’m just trying to pay it forward.”
At Media Day, that sounded mostly like a young player recognizing that his place in the room had changed. A little more than a week later, Ra’Shaad Samples described the same thing from the coach’s side.
Samples liked what he had seen from Tradarian Ball and Brandon Smith. He talked about both freshmen being able to catch the ball and create mismatches, but he spent more time on the adjustment they were making to the physical side of college football.
“There’s been so much growth from those guys,” Samples said. “They’ve really been playing some good ball here lately.”
The bigger transition, Samples said, was understanding that being physical is not something a young running back can turn on when the pads come out or when the ball happens to come his way. Oregon expects it every day.
Then Samples came back to Davison and Hill.
“It’s really cool that Jordon and Dierre were just freshmen,” Samples said. “So they talk to those guys. They’re able to echo sentiments that I’ve shared with them, coaching points, just philosophies that I’ve shared with them, just coming fresh off of it.”
That last part is probably what I overlooked the first time. Davison and Hill are not veterans in the normal sense. Samples even pointed out that people probably think they have played more college football than they actually have. Their usefulness to Ball and Smith comes partly from how recently they were standing in exactly the same place.
Samples also was not talking about developing those freshmen for 2027.
“Those young guys, T-Ball and Brandon Smith, they have to develop fast,” he said. “We saw how many running backs we had to rely on last year.”
That line looks a little different after going through our depth discussion this week. A year ago, there was no reason in August to expect Davison and Hill to have the roles they eventually had. Oregon found out as the season moved along that both could handle more.
Ball and Smith do not have to follow the same path. There is no guarantee either one will move quickly enough to demand a major role this season, but Oregon has just gone through a year in which the running-back room changed substantially from what most people expected in August.
Now the two players who surprised everybody are helping teach the next two.
Hill spent a lot of time talking about the parts of playing running back nobody sees
Hill was always going to be an easy player to write about during camp because the obvious stuff is fun. He is fast, Oregon can move him around and Mehringer has made no secret of wanting to find ways to get him into space.
The Media Day answer I kept coming back to later had almost nothing to do with any of that. Hill was asked what it actually takes to become the three-down back he wants to be. His answer started with protection.
“Just protection, protections and scans,” Hill said. “Knowing every call, knowing all the plays, and just being able to go out there and execute.”
Then he made it even simpler.
“Just going to show my coaches I can be out there, I can protect Dante whenever the next guy’s up,” Hill said. “I’m that guy. I can help the team in any aspect, but definitely blocking is the biggest.”
It was not the flashiest answer of Media Day, and I had plenty of other Hill material by the time camp started. What made me come back to it was Samples describing something that happened later in the running-back room.
Samples said Hill had made an enormous jump in understanding fronts, coverages and blitzes. He described being with Hill late one night while the sophomore was drawing the defense on a board and working his way through what he was seeing.
“I think you’re going to see an unrecognizable player when it comes from growth from last year to this year when it comes to picking up blitzes and understanding what’s going on,” Samples said.
The whiteboard is probably more interesting to me than another story about Hill’s speed.
Everybody saw the speed last year. That was not the part Oregon needed to discover. Oregon needed to know whether Hill could understand enough football to stay on the field when the defense changed the picture and whether Mehringer could move him somewhere else without creating a problem for the rest of the offense.
Samples said Hill had receiver skills last year, but he did not yet have all the details.
“Last year, he had the skill set of the receiver, right, but not the refinement,” Samples said.
Samples went through spatial awareness, route timing, progressions and understanding where the quarterback’s eyes are supposed to go. By this camp, he said Hill could help other players get lined up when Oregon moved him around or changed personnel.
That is the part that makes the possibilities with Hill more real. Moving a running back to receiver because he is fast is easy. Leaving him there while changing formations, protections and responsibilities without making the offense less functional is a different thing.
Hill also talked at Media Day about something the running backs call a “plus-two finish,” essentially doing more than the rep requires and continuing the work when the coaches are not standing over them. “Doing the little things outside of practice, that’s really going to take us to the next level,” he said.
At the time, it sounded like another example of Oregon talking about finish. After hearing Samples describe Hill drawing blitzes late at night, I understood a little better what Hill meant.
Dink Riggs did not spend camp talking like somebody waiting his turn
Da’Jaun “Dink” Riggs was probably the easiest running back to lose in the larger conversation. Davison and Hill had become the established young stars, Samples was talking about Ball and Smith, and Riggs was coming off a season in which injuries kept him from establishing much of anything.
His interview was considerably more interesting than that description makes it sound.
Riggs talked openly about how difficult it was to watch while injured. He had shown enough as a freshman to believe he was on his way toward something, then football reminded him how quickly the opportunity can disappear.
“It bothered me a lot because I know how talented I was,” Riggs said. “I was like, I just need to work because any day this game could be taken away from me.”
That changed some of the way he approached his body and his preparation. It also changed how he talked about fighting for a place in a room that suddenly had a lot more competition.
Riggs was asked directly about Davison and Hill and did not spend much time worrying about what their success meant for him.
“They push me. I push them. We love each other to death, but I’m just trying to get in where I can fit in,” Riggs said. “I’m going to work hard as I can.”
He did not try to predict what September would look like. His answer was essentially that August was for doing his work and the coaches could figure out the rest when they had to.
That may be where Riggs fits into this room better than I originally gave him credit for. He is the most experienced back behind Davison and Hill, but he is still only in his third year, and his own role is hardly settled.
He also had a pretty good description of the personality inside the room.
“We’re very violent, and we love to compete a lot,” Riggs said.
His personal emphasis during the offseason was becoming more physical. Riggs already knew he could make people miss, but he talked about learning when to stop trying to turn every play into 20 yards and simply lower his shoulder for the four or five yards that were there.
That is not a bad thing to hear from a running back trying to get back onto the field.
Simeon Price may have found his job before anybody knows how many carries he gets
Samples was asked during that same interview about Simeon Price, and I probably dismissed part of the answer at the time because I was thinking about the running-back rotation.
Samples was talking about something else. “Simeon’s another coach in there,” Samples said. “We call him Unk.”
The players apparently joked about whether Samples or Price was older. Price has been around enough college football, and enough different coaches, that Samples saw value in simply having his voice in the room.
Sometimes Price would ask Samples if he could talk to the backs himself.
“It’s different when you got a player-led room, when you got a guy in this room who had three or four different offensive coordinators, three or four head coaches giving you perspective from experience,” Samples said. “They all trust him. They believe in him.”
I do not know how many carries Price is going to get, and that answer does not really help us figure it out. It does help explain why a veteran back can have value in a room where so much of the attention is on two sophomores and two freshmen.
There are football jobs, and then there are room jobs. Price sounds as if he already has one of the latter.
Oregon was looking for a backup quarterback the other 10 players would believe in
The quarterback conversation was strange this camp because there really was not a quarterback controversy to drive it.
Dante Moore was the starter. The more interesting question was how Oregon sorted Dylan Raiola, Brock Thomas and Akili Smith Jr. behind him, and Koa Ka’ai eventually gave one of the better answers I heard about how the Ducks evaluate that job.
He did not start with arm strength.
“The guys got to want to play for him,” Ka’ai said. “The guys got to believe in that person. The guys have to want to go out there and battle for that person.”
Then comes the knowledge, consistency and ability to move the offense. Ka’ai said he believed Oregon had four quarterbacks capable of winning games, but he also made clear the staff would not ask each one to be a less experienced copy of Moore.
“The game’s not going to be called the same if Dante Moore is out there compared to Dylan, compared to Brock, compared to KJ,” Ka’ai said.
That answer should probably matter more than whether one backup quarterback throws a better deep ball than another during a practice period. If something happens and Oregon has to play somebody else, Mehringer and Ka’ai are going to call the game for the quarterback who is actually out there.
The evaluation eventually gets pretty basic. Ka’ai wants the player who can consistently move the football and score points.
One of the more specific things he mentioned was how Smith had learned to study. Ka’ai said Smith had to figure out that copying Moore’s routine was not necessarily the answer. What worked for another quarterback might not work for him.
Smith apparently found part of his answer in the guest room at home.
“He goes into his guest room at his place and he has a whiteboard in there and he draws up the install every night,” Ka’ai said. “That works for him.”
There are plenty of easier things to write about with a highly recruited quarterback. I liked that one because there is nothing particularly glamorous about it.
A lot of quarterback development is a guy alone in a room drawing plays until the picture makes sense.
Iverson Hooks kept getting crowded out of the receiver story
There were too many receiver stories this camp.
Evan Stewart was having the best camp of his Oregon career. Dakorien Moore continued to look like one of the young stars of the offense. Jalen Lott, Gatlin Bair and Messiah Hampton kept coming up in interviews, while Ross Douglas was explaining why he did not necessarily care about having a traditional No. 1 receiver.
Somewhere in all of that was Iverson Hooks.
Mehringer was asked about Hooks after Practice 3 and immediately pushed back on the idea that the UAB transfer faced some impossible climb because Oregon had so many receivers.
“We brought Strap here because he’s a good player,” Mehringer said. “It’s not that he’s got to climb a mountain.”
What Hooks did have to do was learn an offense asking him to carry more than he had previously been asked to handle. Mehringer thought he was doing that while still making plays.
“He’s continuing to grow in this offense,” Mehringer said. “I think that he makes plays for us. He does out there.”
Mehringer finished the answer by saying that if Hooks continued to push, “I think that he’ll help us a lot this year.”
I do not know exactly what “a lot” will look like in a receiver room this crowded. That is probably why the answer never became much of a story during camp.
It is still worth remembering.
There may be weeks when Hooks hardly shows up statistically. There also may be some package or matchup where his particular set of skills suddenly makes him much more important than his place on a preseason depth chart would suggest.
The receiver room feels full of players like that.
Michael Bennett came from Yale and found five coaches waiting for every rep
Most of what I wrote about the offensive line during camp dealt with the thing everybody wanted to know: who is going to play?
We still never got a completely clean answer.
Michael Bennett gave me something at Media Day that had almost nothing to do with predicting the five, which may be why I never found the right place for it.
Bennett arrived from Yale with close to 30 college starts. He did not come to Oregon needing somebody to explain how offensive line works, but he did come into a completely different coaching environment.
He had one offensive-line coach at Yale whom he spoke highly of. Oregon felt very different.
“I got five great offensive line coaches,” Bennett said. “A lot of coaching. Every rep’s coached in the moment.” Bennett did not say that as a complaint.
“If you don’t know better, you can’t do better,” he said. “So everybody’s always going to know better.”
That answer stuck out more once A’lique Terry started talking about all the combinations Oregon was running during camp. Bennett was one of the unusual players in that competition because he had considerably more game experience than some of the other candidates but considerably less Oregon experience.
There was technique to change, language to learn and teammates beside him whom he had not spent several years practicing with.
Bennett still sounded pretty comfortable with the competition.
“We all want to see each other win,” he said. “When you’re in a competitive room, everybody’s got to push each other and coach each other because when that happens, that’s when you’re going to have the best five out there, the best unit come December, January.”
He was also asked what really separates offensive linemen when all of the technical discussion gets stripped away. Bennett’s answer was considerably shorter than most offensive-line explanations.
“The underlying factor is, do you like to go hit people?” he said.
He followed that by saying the group that eventually wins often ends up being the five scrappiest players.
“If you’re scrappy, you’re always going to find a way,” Bennett said.
I probably spent several thousand words during camp trying to understand Oregon’s offensive-line combinations. Bennett managed to get part of it down to whether a guy enjoys hitting somebody.
Football does occasionally remain uncomplicated.
The part of Mehringer’s answer I like more now
That brings me back to Mehringer and the puzzle.
When he gave that answer early in camp, Oregon was still figuring out almost everything. The offensive line was wide open, the coaches were experimenting with Hill, the receiver room had more players than obvious jobs and the backup quarterbacks were still getting sorted.
Three weeks later, some of those questions have better answers. Others will probably require an actual game before we know much more.
What changed for me when I went back through these interviews was noticing how often the useful answers were about players who were not necessarily at the center of the story that day.
Ball and Smith were learning behind two sophomores who had just gone through the same thing. Riggs was trying to turn an injury year into another chance. Price had become “Unk” and another voice in the meeting room. Smith had a whiteboard in his guest room. Hooks was trying to find a place in a receiver room where good players were everywhere, and Bennett was getting coached on every rep after arriving with nearly 30 starts already behind him.
None of those things told us who won a practice.
They did not tell us which five offensive linemen will play against Boise State, exactly how many receivers Oregon will rotate or which freshman running back will be first onto the field.
I think that is why I like them better now.
The daily practice report naturally chases whatever seemed most important that afternoon. Going back afterward gives some of the quieter answers another chance, and those answers fill in pieces around the bigger stories we spent August following.
Mehringer was right that every season creates a different puzzle.
Fall camp gave Oregon three weeks to move the pieces around. Some of the pieces that did not make our daily stories may still end up being the ones we are talking about once the games start.