At this point in the sporting calendar, while college football fans across the nation are anxiously waiting for spring football to start in a matter of weeks, we often try to project how the top teams in the nation are going to look at the start of next season.
It’s an easy rabbit hole to get sucked into, looking at past performance, recruiting rankings, returning production, and incoming transfers, all of which help us formulate an opinion on who we think is going to be the best in the upcoming season. For the Oregon Ducks, those aforementioned categories are all fun to talk about, since Eugene has been home to some very successful football over the years, with a bright future ahead thanks to elite recruiting and encouraging transfers added to the mix.
What’s encouraging about the 2023 season, though, is that it could feature one of the most talented rosters we’ve ever seen at Oregon. It’s hard to quantify talent, but one of the best ways is to look back at recruiting rankings and go from there. Of course, some of the best players in Oregon history were not highly-rated recruits — take Marcus Mariota or Justin Herbert, for example — so predicting success based on a 247Sports score is not a perfect practice. However, if you look at some of the top recruits in Oregon history — Kayvon Thibodeaux, Haloti Ngata, Jonathan Stewart, etc. — then you can see that it offers at least a solid representation of perceived talent.
For this exercise, we looked at Oregon’s current roster heading into spring football and took a look at how many of them fall in the top 100 of Oregon’s all-time recruiting list.
Again, it doesn’t offer a perfect picture of how good the Ducks can be in 2023, since some of the players who we expect to be the biggest impact players may not have been highly-rated recruits, but it does show that Oregon’s current roster is among the most talented we’ve ever seen in Eugene.