Wednesday War Room Premium: Where Oregon’s offense can actually make the jump

I have spent a lot of August thinking about what Oregon’s offense is supposed to become under Drew Mehringer, and I keep coming back to the possibility that the answer is not particularly dramatic. That probably sounds strange given the personnel Oregon can put on the field, but I am becoming less convinced that some massive schematic change is necessary for this offense to take another step.

Oregon has a returning quarterback who completed almost 72% of his passes, two sophomore running backs who looked ready for much larger roles before their freshman seasons were finished, one of the country’s most interesting receiver rooms and a tight end in Jamari Johnson who could become a central piece of the passing game. Mehringer also has an idea board sitting in the offensive staff room where coaches can put down concepts they would like to try, yet when he talked about it this week, the question he emphasized was not whether Oregon can run something. It was whether Oregon actually needs it.

That sounds a lot like what he told us during the first week of camp when he called complexity a “double-edged sword” and wondered aloud what good 100 million plays would do if the offense could not get enough repetitions to execute them properly. Three weeks later, the 2025 numbers give us a much better idea of what he may be trying to solve.