Dan Lanning Recaps Oregon's First Scrimmage of Fall Camp

Following day nine of Oregon Football fall camp, coach Dan Lanning briefly met with media to review the Ducks’ first scrimmage of the 2024 preseason.

Below are notable questions and quotes plus my thoughts at the bottom:

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Opening Statement:

“Good, competitive scrimmage. Good physicality, guys were out there running to the ball, attacking, blocking hard.”

“I think there are a lot of things operationally that we can clean up and improve whether it’s pre-snap, penalties, shift motions, handling those the proper way.”

“Plenty to work on but saw a slight improvement on where we want to be.”

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On the quality of snaps and center/quarterback exchanges:

“Yeah pretty good for the most part. There were some snaps that could be better.“

On explosive plays from the offense in this scrimmage:

“We were limited from an explosive plays standpoint, we want to be able to see some more of those.”

“I thought the offense did a much better job on third down overall in comparison to the defense but it’s a little give and take.”

On the biggest positive he saw today:

“Just the competitive toughness, the guys competed from the minute we started until the minute it finished.”

“We want to win every rep and did a pretty good job of getting to the next play.”

On the quarterback group’s decision-making:

“Pretty good, we had one turnover on the day, didn’t create as many there overall but I thought we protected the ball well.”

On how he’ll move forward over the next couple of weeks:

“We’ll go watch some film here ASAP, get right up on where we need to grow as a team on every side of the ball.”

On what he made of quarterback Dillon Gabriel‘s scrimmage performance:

“I think he’s operating in the system. He understands what we want to be able to accomplish and he’s getting more and more comfortable as we go.”

On the connection between Oregon’s quarterbacks and wide receivers:

“I think there’s a lot of trust on both parts for guys to be where they’re supposed to be and the ball to be there when they get there.”

On tackling:

“I thought we tackled well but we’ll have to go back and watch film to assess that.”

On whether Noah Whittington was able to participate in the scrimmage:

“He was, yeah.”

On differences between his first and now third fall camp as a head coach:

“I don’t know that it feels that different, it’s time to work, right?”

“I walk away from these things thinking about all of the things we have to improve and work on so that’s where my mindset’s at right now.”

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Linden’s take:

It sounds like this was a fairly typical first fall scrimmage, with some exceptions.

You generally don’t hear coaches say they’re pleased with their team’s tackling this early in camp so it’s interesting to hear that Lanning was generally happy with that.

Noah Whittington being able to scrimmage was a positive note as well.

From what we’ve heard it seems like he’ll be fully operational to start the season but it’s always hard to know how staffs will re-integrate players coming off of major injuries like Whittington’s.

The camp theme of physicality seems to have shown up again today as almost all players have noted this as a big impression point of fall camp thus far.

My impression from Lanning’s quotes are that the offense was efficient and safe with the ball but not necessarily explosive on Saturday.

Fans will want to pay attention to the frequency of long plays early in the season as that will tell them a lot about how this offense will look compared to 2023.

The final thing I’ll touch on is the center/quarterback exchanges from the first quote.

It’s always a bit of a concern when a team has to break in a new starting center as getting snaps wrong can truly wreck an offense.

It’ll never be perfect 100% of the time but Lanning seems to think center Iapani Laloulu is doing a good job, or at least did on Saturday.

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