Oregon Ducks Football: Winners Or Victims Of Transfer Portal?

How does the Oregon Ducks and Oregon coach Dan Lanning successfully evaluate transfers to fit into their team and culture? It's the transfer portal era in college football and the Ducks measure up better than most.

Oregon Ducks coach Dan Lanning Utilizing transfer portal / Darby winter

How are the Oregon Ducks and Oregon coach Dan Lanning best using the transfer portal?

The transfer portal: it seems like everyday in the sports media world, that phrase is thrown out to a casual extent. Ever since the transfer portal became a viable option for NCAA teams in 2018, many college football teams have tried to harness this new avenue for recruiting as a way to fix their teams. The logic behind this thought process is if you get already developed veteran athletes from other programs, they’re sure to plug the gaps found in a team.

However, sports commentators Josh Pate and David Pollack disagree. In both of their weekend wrap-ups on each of their prospective shows, the media personalities pushed back on the notion of “the portal will provide.” They claim the portal can get you so far, but knowing how to implement an athlete from another program successfully is a different skill not many have mastered.

Oregon wide receiver Tez Johnson catches a pass under cover from Oregon State defensive back Josiah Johnson as the Oregon State Beavers host the Oregon Ducks Saturday, Sept. 14, 2024 at Reser Stadium in Corvallis, Ore. / Ben Lonergan/The Register-Guard / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

Oregon is going to be facing this predicament going into next year. Right now, the Ducks have a surplus of departing veteran talent after this year, including the potential to lose 10 athletes on the defense, starting quarterback Dillon Gabriel is on his final year, and seven other offensive players are looking to head to the pros or have played out their eligibility (including favorite wide receiver target Tez Johnson).

So far under the Dan Lanning era, recruiting through the transfer portal for talent that fits with the Oregon system has been quite successful. Prime examples of striking transfer portal gold is in Oregon’s quarterbacks, former Auburn athlete Bo Nix and former Oklahoma Sooner Gabriel.

Oregon quarterback Anthony Brown Jr. acknowledges the crowd after the win over California. Eug 101521 Uofb Cal 24 / [Chris Pietsch/The Register-Guard] / USA TODAY NETWORK

However, Oregon fans may remember when this strategy has gone sour previously for the Ducks. Former Duck coach Mario Cristobal brought in Boston College transfer quarterback Anthony Brown, who didn’t quite fit in with the style of play-calling and push and pull of coaching influences on offense that year for Oregon, leading to lack-luster results and even fans actively booing the team and Brown in Autzen Stadium during their close win against California in 2021.

Sep 2, 2024; Tallahassee, Florida, USA; Florida State Seminoles quarterback DJ Uiagalelei (4) before the game agasint the Boston College Eagles at Doak S. Campbell Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Melina Myers-Imagn Images / Melina Myers-Imagn Images

For Pate and Pollack, both pointed to Florida State as an example for using the transfer portal poorly. Last year, the Seminoles went 13-1. Now, they’re fighting for their first win at 0-3. During the off-season, the team attempted to rebuild through the transfer portal, by grabbing big names like quarterback DJ Uiagalelei from Oregon State.

"You're entering a new world in college football,” Pate said on his broadcast. “This is kind of the first example of it. It will not be the last example of it. When the transfer portal has done what it's done to the sport, you're going to have even some really good teams like Florida State lean on it, and in the feast or famine era of the transfer portal, you're going to have examples of a team that does sky-high things one year and the bottom falls out the next year way worse than it ever could have before."

“The portal is not-- you can't live and sustain a program, I don't think, from the portal but I do think you can take away some of those holes and deficiencies and youth and inexperience with guys that are experienced to come in and fill some gaps,” Pollack said.

Essentially, these two broadcasters posit that the portal is like playing roulette; you don’t know if the talent you’re getting is going to translate with your other athletes and your team culture or even your style of play calling. During fall camp, several transfers that came to Oregon expressed that learning the playbook and Oregon’s specific calls and lingos took up quite a bit of time.

Sep 14, 2024; Corvallis, Oregon, USA; Oregon Ducks quarterback Dillon Gabriel (8) greets fans after the game against the Oregon State Beavers at Reser Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Craig Strobeck-Imagn Images / Craig Strobeck-Imagn Images

"But this year, I knew that the difficult part of it was going to be time was of the essence and learning an offense and having command and control of it," Gabriel said about learning the Oregon offense as a transfer.

Changing from one program to another isn’t like changing the channel, more like changing the streaming service. The bones are there, but you have to unlearn the last program and pick up the intricacies of a new one all in a single off-season. Pate and Pollack argued in their weekly shows that schools still recruiting high school talent and developing them are at an advantage because of this aspect.

"That's why you're going to bet on all the teams that high school recruit the most. If you're building a program, you're not going to build a sustainable program through the portal which you don't know what you're going to get every single year. You know what you have when you do high school recruiting and you start to blend things together and you start to develop,” Pollack said.

This year, Oregon seems to be chugging along fine with most of their transfers. If you look at the way Lanning develops his athletes as a team instead of individuals, it becomes clear that there’s a culture of “togetherness” instead of cobbled together elements. 

Lanning even used the African word “Ubuntu” in fall camp, the word meaning “I am because we are.” So far through the portal, Lanning has done a good job at identifying talent that is right for Oregon, not just talent for the sake of talent. 

Will Oregon one day fall victim to a transfer portal trap under Lanning? Time will tell, as Florida State certainly wasn’t under the impression they’d be 0-3 by this part of the season with their transfer pulls. However, it seems like Oregon’s current administration is doing their due diligence, and using the transfer portal as a supplement, not a fix, and Pate and Pollack acknowledge that too.

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