First in a series on jobs/roles the Ducks must fill to take the PAC and challenge for the College Football Playoff.
As the CEO of a one hundred million dollar business, a top college football coach faces myriad challenges and responsibilities. He has to run with the Tigers and stand against the Tide, all while replacing 30% of his work force every year. Attrition, graduation, injuries and transfers eat away at his true bottom line, winning.
If the Ducks want to continue their rise to the sport's upper echelon, they have to do more than just fill positions. They have to identify new stars and standouts, players who make a winning difference.
Position: Field General
Job Description: Not all quarterbacks are Field Generals. To be worthy of the designation, a QB has to take charge in crucial moments, infuse his team with confidence by performing under pressure. He has to lead comebacks. He has to read the defense and stand in with rushers in his face. A Field General makes big, memorable plays when the offense needs them while limiting his mistakes, showing the ability to improvise and process quickly when things break down.
Quarterbacks who reach this level are capable of leaps of intuition. They have an indefinable extra sense that leads to extraordinary plays and uncanny solutions.
Here are a few examples from Duck history, turning point moments from great players:
Joey Harrington, Jeremiah Masoli and Dennis Dixon (in 2007) were all Field Generals, each with their own style and skill set. It's the results that hold them in common, the ability to win big games by taking command of them.
For different reasons, each guy is a study in determination and resilience, making them perfect Mario Cristobal quarterbacks. Brown won the job with the Eagles as a true freshman. He's come back from three knee surgeries. He believes in himself so strongly that he's traveling all the way across the country on the heels of a pandemic with no guarantee of a starting position.
Meanwhile Shough is a Dean's List student with 62% accuracy as a four-star prep at Chandler High School in Arizona. Multiple times he's been Oregon's Lifter of the Week at the quarterback position while sculpting his 6-5 frame from 206 to 220. Inspiration is right there at home: his mother is a Stage 4 breast cancer survivor.
Other Shough highlights come at the ten-minute mark of this video; the rest is an illustration of one of Justin Herbert's most complete games at Oregon.
Shough got in with seven minutes to play, lacing a touchdown pass to Mycah Pittman and trucking a USC defender at the end.
Joe Moorhead's offense places a lot of responsibility on the quarterback as a decision maker. There are RPO tags on nearly every play, requiring the QB to recognize favorable matchups while avoiding getting baited into a sucker read.
Negative plays are drive-killers. The best QBs know how to get out of a bad play, avoiding sacks and turnovers. Sometimes the best option is to get out of the pocket and get rid of the football, or simply find a safe place to dump it, even at a running back's feet. Living to fight another down is way better than a bigger mistake.
There's no greater aggravation for a football fan than watching a four-year starter taking a needless sack. The best field generals are aware of all their options, even when that means taking the best of bad ones. He finds creative ways to keep his team in front of the sticks and in the game, rarely wasting possessions with mental errors. He learns to stack together small successes and keep his offense moving, keeping plays alive, giving his playmakers extra opportunities to do their thing.
Ultimately, great leadership is about building trust and developing flow, a kind of intuitive communication, like the hive-mind a SEAL team has on its most sensitive missions.
Justin Herbert's Oregon career ended on a note as perfect as a John Coltrane solo. He came back for his senior year, won 12 games and a PAC-12 Championship. Rushing for three touchdowns in a Rose Bowl victory over Big Ten Wisconsin, he played a game for the ages, one in which he finally displayed the combination of fire and improvisation fans always hoped to find in his long series of cool, careful performances. As the sun set over the San Gabriel Mountains he showed a bit of Masoli's swagger and Harrington's fierce passion. For an afternoon he became the competitor and quarterback his awesome tools suggested he could be.
Training camp this year, provided it happens, opens a new era after a long one defined by two storied tenures, Mariota near the beginning of the decade and Herbert at the end. It's uncertain who'll win the job, though it's Shough's to lose at the outset. He's the taller, smoother quarterback with superior accuracy, the one quality that's hardest to teach.
Brown's never had this kind of coaching or a defense and running game like this one. On his visit he and his family were wowed not by the splendor of the facilities but by the solidity of the culture. Transfer quarterbacks typically come to elevate a program. In this case, it might be that the culture elevates the player. He's tough and athletic, 14-11 as a starter with a mediocre supporting cast, reshaping his plans after a change in coaches at BC.
The graduate transfer is athletic and experienced, a starter over three injury-shortened seasons who improved his game measurably as a junior under new offensive coordinator Mike Bajakian.
As Herbert's backup in 2019, Shough flashed a great feel for the game and a knack for extending and saving plays, thinking under pressure.
Moorhead has done great work with quarterbacks in the past. A two-time Offensive Coordinator of the Year at Penn State in 2016-17, he'll chose the guy who can best operate all the options in his multiple, nuanced and cohesive scheme.
If Oregon Governor Kate Brown (no relation) unshutters Autzen Stadium, August should be epic. Imagine Clubber Lang versus Ivan Drago, fifteen rounds of haymakers to the cranium and solar plexus, the tall Nordic blonde from the football super lab versus the fast-talking club bouncer and street fighter from the East Coast, each battling to headline the rematch with Ohio State, a preseason tilt with more compelling story lines than all Rocky, Rocky II, Rocky III and Rocky IV combined. It's a promoter's dream, an offensive coordinator's ideal scenario. Iron sharpens iron. Neither will back down from the other, nor will they from Justin Fields on national television a month later.
