Flock Talk Premium: Oregon is recruiting the culture it wants to inherit

Rashad Wadood said something after Practice 12 that has stayed with me because I think it explains considerably more than the state of Oregon’s secondary. “This is the most bought-in team I’ve ever been around of guys wanting to be better for each other,” Oregon’s defensive backs coach said, and the most important part of that sentence may be the final three words.

There is a meaningful difference between wanting to become better than the player beside you and wanting to become better for him. Oregon needs both. Dan Lanning has built a program where competition is supposed to be uncomfortable, Drew Mehringer has described the roster as a meritocracy and the first scrimmage turned the idea of accountability into something tangible when Lanning said players who are not accountable and capable will receive fewer repetitions. Nobody is being promised comfort simply because the Ducks also talk about connection.

What makes Wadood’s observation interesting is that Oregon appears to be attempting something much more difficult than creating a competitive roster. The Ducks want players to battle for the same finite opportunities while simultaneously helping the person trying to take those opportunities become better. That tension has been visible throughout fall camp, and the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that its origins go much further back than anything Oregon installed this summer.

Player-led teams are not simply created during fall camp. In many ways, they are recruited years in advance.

The idea of players developing one another sounds wonderful when the depth chart remains hypothetical. It becomes considerably more revealing when the competition begins producing winners and losers, which is where Oregon increasingly finds itself as camp moves toward its second scrimmage.

The quarterback room provides an obvious example.