Oregon Football Practice Recap: Sept. 19

By Rob Moseley
Editor, GoDucks.com

Venue: Autzen Stadium
Format: Fast Friday

The scrimmage for non-travel squad players that preceded Friday’s practice, as it does each week, encompassed close to 20 snaps in less than 10 minutes. For each and every one of those plays, the offensive line was, left to right, Braden Eggert, Jim Weber, Brigham Stoehr, Tanner Davies and Matt McFadden.

Such ironman duty wasn’t new to the young offensive linemen this week. With the scout-team thinned this week due to some question marks higher on the depth chart, Eggert, Weber, Stoehr, Davies and McFadden were together for every snap in practice all week, an effort not to go unnoticed as the No. 2 Ducks prepare for Saturday’s game at Washington State (7:30 p.m. PT, ESPN).

Last week against Wyoming, Oregon’s offense ran 68 plays. The scout-team offense, and its cast-iron quintet up front, ran 70-plus a couple of days this week, and in a window closer to one hour than the three hours in which the Wyoming game was played.

“We just really had to push through it,” Eggert said. "We didn’t have any backups, so if we got tired we’d help each other, tell each other we were about to finish, and finish the series off."

“You’ve just got to keep going, push through it,” Davies said. “If you just keep working and don’t look at the clock, it’s going to fly by.”

McFadden and Stoehr are veterans of the program, while Weber, of Beaverton, and Davies, from Sheldon High in Eugene, are 2014 high school graduates. Eggert is the only scholarship player of the group, still a scout this week even though position coach Steve Greatwood hinted recently it’s not too late in the season to considering pulling someone off a redshirt track.

“I’ve come really far – my conditioning, my weight’s going down, I just feel better,” said Eggert, who has lost more than 20 pounds since the start of preseason camp and is just under 320 at this point. “If I need to step up, I will. I know all the plays now, so I feel like I could if I need to.”

As a local kid, Davies said practicing with the Ducks has been “like a dream come true. It’s really exciting.”

Not only did the scout-team offensive line play without breaks this week, it had to tangle with Oregon’s dominant starting front of DeForest Buckner, Alex Balducci and Arik Armstead, and their backups. The scout-team line played through fatigue despite those unfavorable matchups, giving the UO defense the looks they’ll see from the Cougars on Saturday night.

Scout-team scrimmage highlights: Morgan Mahalak was really spinning the ball when he dropped back behind those linemen. He opened the scrimmage period with completions to Chris Tewhill and Jake McCreath, and later dropped a deep ball over two defensive backs and into McCreath’s hands for a long completion. … Jordan Kurahara recovered a fumble and got to a running back in the backfield on separate plays, and Jalen Jelks tackled a couple backs for minimal gains. … Tewhill took a swing pass and found room up the sideline for a long gain.