There is a downside to all of the talk about Oregon’s depth that we probably have not spent enough time discussing. When you have this many good players competing for a limited number of roles, eventually somebody who is good enough to play is still going to lose something.
That might be a starting job, a target, a place in the first five or the No. 2 quarterback job. It might be something much smaller, like being the third receiver into the game instead of the second, but those things matter to players who have spent most of their lives being one of the best players on every team they have played for.
For most of August, Oregon has been able to talk about all of this as a positive because it is a positive. There are more players who can help than there are obvious holes on the roster, and that is a much better problem than trying to figure out whether you have enough good players to get through the season.
The first scrimmage started to change that conversation when Dan Lanning talked about players being accountable and capable. If you do your job and prove that you are capable of doing what Oregon asks, you keep getting opportunities; if you do not, those opportunities start to disappear.
The second scrimmage pushed things a little farther down that road. I think we are getting pretty close to the point where the staff knows who is seriously in the mix at most positions, and the next question is how many of those players actually get enough work to become part of the plan for the opener.
That is where I think this week gets really interesting.
