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It used to be that when a college football team lined up on a Saturday afternoon in April to showcase its improvement over the offseason, you could expect to see virtually what you would see on a Saturday afternoon in September — two teams made up of offense, defense and special teams getting after it in game-like fashion until a winner is declared.
Spring football over the past decade has strayed from that, though. Now, it’s almost as common to see the offense play the defense with a scoring system that rewards the defenders for things such as sacks, stops on third down and turnovers. Some teams have thrown in gimmicks where they auction off the ability for a fan to call plays during the spring game, and other coaches have done away with the scrimmage altogether, opting for a public practice instead.
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With Oregon’s annual spring game just a week away, Dan Lanning informed everyone what the format is expected to be on Saturday, April 23.
“It will be very similar to a game format,” Lanning said on Saturday.
Short, sweet and to the point.
What Lanning means by that “game format” is the Ducks’ roster will be split into two teams consisting of an offense, defense and special teams. The teams will then play the game as you would any other week of the season and determine a winner in the end.
How will teams be decided though? Will coaches draft players? Will players choose which team they want to go with?
“We’ll split the teams up. We’ll talk about it this weekend,” Lanning.
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Never one to show his cards before he needs to, Lanning seems to be approaching his first game action at Oregon with an intention to avoid gimmicks. For him, it’s about the talent on the field and how the players perform. On top of that, there will be a number of highly rated recruits in Eugene for visits, so the desire to pack the crowd and create a game-like atmosphere has been stressed several times over at this point.
With the format that we are now expecting to see, a game-like atmosphere won’t be hard to replicate. We’ll get kickoffs and punts and third-down conversions. The green team will look to down the yellow team, and vice versa. Live football is coming back to Autzen Stadium.
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