Dylan Raiola did not begin the night expecting any of this to be about him. He did not take the field in Los Angeles as Oregon’s starting quarterback, and he certainly did not expect his opportunity to come because Dante Moore would leave the game on a cart after a frightening second-quarter hit.
That part matters, because Raiola’s performance cannot be separated from the emotion of the moment. His first words afterward were about Moore, about how seeing him down “shook the whole team,” and about the responsibility the Ducks felt to keep fighting for him. But once the game resumed, Oregon needed more than emotion. It needed a quarterback who had spent months preparing for a moment nobody could predict.
And that is where Raiola’s story really begins.
