There is a tendency when things go wrong in college football to look for the simplest explanation, whether that means blaming the quarterback, questioning the offensive coordinator or deciding that the offensive line simply isn’t talented enough. Oregon’s loss to UCLA provided plenty of opportunities for all three, and judging by the reaction since Saturday, there is no shortage of people convinced they know exactly where the blame belongs. But the problems facing this offense are considerably more complicated than any one player or coach, and some of the most important questions have less to do with what happened Saturday than with decisions made months before the Ducks ever took the field.
This week’s Take Two looks at two of those decisions, both of which deserve more scrutiny than they’ve received. The first goes back to Oregon’s offseason evaluation of its offensive line and the confidence that led the staff to rely on development rather than aggressively pursuing proven transfers. The second examines an offensive operation that had already been exposed by Oklahoma State, continued showing troubling tendencies in our own analytical evaluations and still arrived at the UCLA game without dependable answers. Dan Lanning made it clear Monday that changes are underway, and perhaps those changes will produce the results Oregon desperately needs. But before we can determine whether the solutions are right, it’s worth asking how the Ducks arrived at a point where those solutions became necessary in the first place.
