Tag: Ty Thompson

It may be time for the Oregon Ducks to have a difficult conversation about QB Anthony Brown

After another lackluster performance from Anthony Brown, the coaches may need to have a serious conversation about his role as the starter, with Ty Thompson waiting in the wing.

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It’s hard to put things more succinctly than Oregon Ducks starting quarterback Anthony Brown did on Saturday night when assessing his play.

“Excuse my language, but I played like s**t.”

Can’t argue with. Brown finished the day throwing 14-for-26 for 186 yards with one interception and 0 touchdowns. He added 35 yards on the ground with two scores, but ultimately the most important stat to measure his performance by is a loss.

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For the first time as a starter, Brown couldn’t lead the Ducks to a victory, watching them fall instead to the Stanford Cardinal in overtime, 31-24.

There are a lot of things that you could blame this loss on. The officiating down the stretch certainly got a lot of attention, but Oregon has to shoulder a ton of blame as well. The offense was absent in the first half, and the defense struggled before the break. Time management and playcalling were suspect in the 4th quarter, and injuries also played a part.

Despite the litany of reasons, though, one sticks out. Anthony Brown wasn’t good enough. And to be completely honest, we’re getting to the point in the season where it might be clear that he isn’t going to be good enough going forward.

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As a 6th year senior, this is who Brown is. He is a career 55% completion-rate passer who can get you some yards on the ground and avoid mistakes for the most part. He’s not going to wow you with many throws, but he should deliver when asked to do so. However, that has been a big problem so far in Oregon, with a number of passes to receivers often way off target, hampering the passing game with a stable of receivers that are among the most talented in program history. Looking at his performance through 5 weeks of the season and hoping that he is going to have something click and show improvement all of a sudden is a bit far-fetched.

With that being said, it may be time for Mario Cristobal and the Ducks coaching staff to finally have that tough conversation about Brown, and whether or not he truly is the right quarterback to lead this team.

The Ducks’ season is not over with the loss to Stanford, but it definitely got harder. Without a clear path to the CFP, on top of the litany of injuries that continue to pile up, there seems to be a better chance that Oregon ends up settling for a Rose Bowl now rather than a trip to the playoff. But if you had to ask yourself which QB would be better suited to lead the Ducks to one of those two destinations, picking between Brown and true freshman Ty Thompson, who would you choose?

Don’t have an answer? Isn’t that kind of an answer right there?

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The fact that we aren’t convinced that Brown can be better than Thompson at this point is alarming, but something that we may need to start accepting. Oregon’s offense is obviously hampered in the passing game with Brown on the field, and though the running game is rolling, a change in scheme may need to come soon with the likely lengthy absence for CJ Verdell. If Thompson was brought in to play ahead of Brown, would it open up the passing game?

Isn’t it worth it to give it a shot?

We bring this up now because it is a perfect time for the Ducks to make the switch, should they decide to. You’ve seen enough from Brown, and now, heading into a BYE week after a loss, it gives you enough time to prepare the true freshman to take over the reins and get ready to start. With the Cal Golden Bears as an opponent, Thompson would then have a relatively easy first opponent to face as well, before traveling down to UCLA to face the Bruins.

There is no saying whether or not the Ducks will actually make the switch from Brown to Thompson. They’ve been pretty loyal to AB thus far, and it wouldn’t come as a shock to see him remain the starter going forward.

All we’re asking, though, is that they have the conversation. It’s a tough one to bring up, but could be better for the team as a whole both in the short term, and long term if handled correctly.

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A dream realized: QB Ty Thompson breaks down his first action as an Oregon Duck

“It’s an excitement I’ve never experienced before.” Ty Thompson relives his first action at QB for the Ducks, and how special the moment was.

The hype surrounding true freshman quarterback Ty Thompson was looming large before he even took an official snap for the Oregon Ducks.

As a 4-star recruit from Mesquite High School in Arizona, Thompson came to Eugene as the highest-rated QB to ever sign with the Ducks, and his place as the future phenom behind the center had already been cemented by many fans of the program. Some were even disappointed that it wasn’t Thompson to be named the starting QB at the beginning of the year, even though it’s become incredibly clear that Anthony Brown is the right man to lead this Oregon team.

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Regardless of your preconceived notions when it comes to No. 17, seeing him take the field on Saturday night was a boost of energy for the Ducks. Leading by only 10 points against an FCS team, with Brown knocked out of the second half with minor injury concerns, it was time for the freshman to show a bit of what he will bring in the future at Oregon.

He surely didn’t disappoint, and it lived up to his expectations along the way.

“Getting called upon coming out a half, it’s just some excitement I’ve never experienced before,” Thompson said on Tuesday. “Obviously, to play high school ball was real fun, but getting out in your first snaps on a college football field was a lot of fun. We were pretty successful, obviously moved the ball down the field a few times. And, you know, the team really took me under their wing, helped me so it was a lot of fun and a really good experience for sure.”

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A word that many coaches and players have used to describe Thompson so far is ‘poised.’ He showed that Saturday, going 6-for-9 passing with 82 yards and two touchdowns. He led four scoring drives in the second half, and helped the Ducks pull away from Stony Brook and pick up a blowout victory.

“He’s really poised,” said senior wide receiver Johnny Johnson III. “You know he’s having fun out there, he didn’t get big-eyed or real scared in the moment. He kind of just got comfortable, and you know, he had a job to do and he helped us win the game.”

Two highlights from his play were his pair of touchdown passes, both of which went to true freshmen in TE Terrance Ferguson and WR Dont’e Thornton. It acted as the first career touchdown for the trio of underclassmen.

“Hitting the field for the first time with all my guys and throwing my first touchdown pass to one of my best friend’s Terrence Ferguson; I couldn’t have dreamed of a better situation,” Thompson said.

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If things go right in Eugene, this should be one of the few times we see Thompson on the field for the rest of the year. As long as Brown can stay healthy — the starting QB is expected to play this week vs. Arizona — then the only need for the true freshman to return to play is in blowouts, like on Saturday.

At long last, though, we finally got to see what Thompson can do. We can walk away from his first action on the field and feel confident that he will be solid both in relief and in the future. Fans shouldn’t hope to see much more of him this season, but they can at least sleep well at night knowing that the outlook at QB in Oregon is in good hands with some incredibly high upside.

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Making Grades: Oregon’s offensive line is an enigma this season; Ty Thompson fills in admirably

The mystery of the offensive line needs to be solved quickly as the Pac-12 season is now here, but overall grades vs. Stony Brook look good.

It’s report card time again and there’s a lot to like in Oregon’s 48-7 win over Stony Brook, but there are definitely some improvements to be had as well, with conference play right around the corner. For the first time all year, the receiving corps played a key role in a win with a lot of freshman getting their first taste of Division I football.

True freshman Ty Thompson had to fill in for an injured Anthony Brown and the secondary dominated with three interceptions.

But the offensive line continues to be a mystery. The group played poorly against Fresno State, but were great on the road in Columbus and was the No. 1 key as to why the Ducks pulled off the shocker. Now against Stony Brook, an FCS school, the offensive line was below average to put it mildly. So are they that great line we saw at Ohio State or are they just an average line we saw in Weeks 1 and 3? Just like how many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop? The world may never know.

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QUARTERBACK

Grade: A

Before Brown was knocked out of the game right before halftime, he was having his best game in an Oregon uniform, going 14-of-18 passing for 159 yards and a touchdown. He also added another rushing touchdown as well.  Then due to a couple of big hits, true freshman Ty Thompson was forced to make his college debut and the offense didn’t miss a beat. He connected on two touchdown passes and finished the game 6-of-9 passing for 82 yards, leading a total of four scoring drives in the end.

Overall, it was an encouraging day for the future of the Ducks’ QB position.

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Stock Up, Stock Down: Which Oregon players had biggest impact in blowout win over Stony Brook?

Oregon has a lot to clean up after the blowout over Stony Brook, but these players had great games, and deserve to be recognized.

The Oregon Ducks were once again the class of the Pac-12 on Saturday, and they did so without a particularly inspiring win over the Stony Brook Seawolves. Sure, the final score was a blowout, but the way they got there was a little sloppy, to say the least.

However, a win is a win, and that’s more than most of the other top teams in the Pac-12 can say on Sunday. No. 13 UCLA lost to Fresno State in a Pac-12 After Dark thriller, and No. 19 Arizona State fell to No. 21 BYU. After three weeks of the season, Oregon is the only team left standing with an undefeated record in the conference, which isn’t great.

So with that in mind, Duck fans can at least be happy with the fact that they are still spotless heading into the conference slate, with a game next week against Arizona, who lost their 19th consecutive game on Saturday.

Before we look forward, though, let’s take a look back and analyze what we saw against the Seawolves. Here is our stock report on the Ducks’ players, and how they impacted the game on Saturday:

Mario Cristobal says Anthony Brown should be ‘good to go’ for Arizona game

The Oregon head coach says his starting quarterback should be healthy going forward after being knocked out of the 2nd half of the Stony Brook game.

Crisis averted.

After Oregon’s 48-7 victory over Stony Brook, Ducks head coach Mario Cristobal gave an update on his injured quarterback Anthony Brown.

According to Cristobal, Brown “took a pretty good shot” towards the end of the first half. Brown was sacked on consecutive plays right before halftime and was seen walking off the field a bit woozy.

He didn’t return from the locker room for the second half.

Oregon had to turn to true freshman Ty Thompson to play in what was a close game and had meaningful snaps. The Ducks led just by 10 points at 17-7 when Thompson came in.

Luckily for everyone involved, Thompson played well, going 6-of-9 for 82 yards and two touchdowns. Before Brown was knocked out of the game, he was having a very productive night as he was 14-of-18 for 159 yards and a touchdown.

Hopefully Brown is healthy enough to play against Arizona next week, but if not, the Ducks know what they have in Thompson should they have to go without Brown for any length of time.

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Everything we know following Oregon’s 48-7 win over Stony Brook

Oregon did all it needed to do against an overmatched Stony Brook squad, and90/ the Ducks can now look towards Pac-12 play.

This was probably not what Oregon Ducks head coach Mario Cristobal was looking for after shocking the world in Columbus, but they got the job done.

Oregon had to fight tooth-and-nail for the majority of the first half against Football Subdivision Stony Brook, but after an explosive second half, the Ducks ended up pulling away with a 48-7 win over the Seawolves.

The Ducks found themselves up just 17-7 at halftime that saw the Seawolves pretty much hold their own against Oregon’s line on both sides of the ball. Safety Verone McKinley III managed two first-half interceptions that stifled would-be Stony Brook scoring drives.

Even though they had to do it with true freshman Ty Thompson at quarterback, the No. 4 team in the country made the necessary adjustments at the break to avoid another nailbiter.

WATCH: Ty Thompson throws first career TD pass to Terrence Ferguson

WATCH: Ty Thompson throws first career TD pass to Terrence Ferguson

This may be a connection Oregon fans might get used to seeing in the next three-plus seasons.

True freshman quarterback Ty Thompson threw the first touchdown pass of his career on a four-yard pass to another true freshman, tight end Terrance Ferguson. It was Ferguson’s first career score.

Thompson was brought into the game to begin the second half as starter Anthony Brown was dinged up just before the haltime break. It wasn’t a good first drive for Thompson as the Ducks were forced to punt. But on his second drive, the freshman led the Ducks on a 10-play, 48-yard touchdown drive to give Oregon a three-possession lead at 24-7 midway through the third quarter over Stony Brook.

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Ty Thompson takes the field as Oregon Ducks backup QB vs. Stony Brook

With the game vs. Stony Brook well in hand for the Ducks, it is true freshman Ty Thompson that comes in as the QB2 behind Anthony Brown Jr.

It’s not often that you look at the announcement of a backup quarterback and see it as a major decision. But for the Oregon Ducks, it feels pretty massive.

So when it was true freshman Ty Thompson that trotted onto the field as the QB2 against Stony Brook, people took notice. Heading into Saturday’s game, we were unaware which freshman QB for the Ducks would be getting snaps following Anthony Brown.

For many Oregon fans, this anointment of Thompson is going to be very well received. A large contingent was hoping that Thompson would get the starting position over Anthony Brown ahead of the season, and several were still calling for No. 17 after Brown’s showing in Week 1 against Fresno State. However, the things that AB has done on the field since Week 1 absolutely warrant him staying in that QB1 role going forward.

Regardless, there is nothing wrong with being excited to see what Thompson can do. As the highest quarterback recruit in Oregon history, many fans believe that he is the future at the position for the Ducks, and it will be exciting to get a sneak preview of his abilities against the Seawolves.

Should he play well, though, don’t get too excited Duck fans. Consider the opponent, and also consider the fact that Anthony Brown is the team’s starting QB, and nothing that happens Saturday is likely to change that.

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Fair or not, Oregon’s stagnant offense leads to more questions about Anthony Brown

Stuck in history between Justin Herbert and Ty Thompson, Oregon’s QB Anthony Brown is being asked to shoulder the blame for a stagnant offense, fair or unfair.

It was always going to be an uphill battle for sixth-year senior quarterback Anthony Brown Jr.

With a decent portion of the Oregon fanbase calling for true freshman Ty Thompson to be the guy under center before the first game even kicked off, it was going to take a near-perfect performance from No. 13 to win over the crowd and give confidence that he was the guy to lead the Ducks in what has the foundation of a highly successful season.

That’s definitely not what happened on Saturday against Fresno State.

Brown led 12 offensive drives in the season-opener — 14 if you’re counting, but two of those came in wind-down-the-clock scenarios before the half and end of the game. Seven of those drives resulted in either a punt or a turnover on downs; one of those drives ended in a field goal after starting on the edge of the red zone; just four of those drives resulted in touchdowns, two of which started inside the Fresno 30, and the Fresno 5, respectively.

That’s a lot of numbers to parse through, so let me just tell you what they all add up to — an inefficient Oregon offense that left a lot to be desired from a fanbase that has been starved of vintage and braggadocious Ducks football for quite some time.

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Blaming the offensive stagnation on Brown alone is completely unfair. He can not be held accountable for an offensive line that was rotating players in and out until deep into the fourth quarter, looking to find the right match to try and contain Fresno’s front-four. He also isn’t responsible for a group of receivers that struggled to gain separation over the Bulldog’s secondary, rarely getting open downfield. There’s also the topic of playcalling, which once again left fans crying for aggressive deep shots downfield, rather than a series of 3-4 yard gains on inside zone read and endless short passes to the boundary.

None of that is AB’s fault, but as the leader of the offense, he is the man who is going to be asked to answer for the shortcomings. After the game, he was ultimately displeased.

“As a whole, I would say that it wasn’t clean enough,” Brown said. “It was obvious from everybody’s outside perspective. Even from us, we just know that we didn’t play clean enough. We’ve just got to get back on the film, fix what we have to fix, and get ready for next week.”

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There are absolutely things that can be fixed, and it’s not a huge surprise that the Ducks were a bit rusty in their first game of the season. However, even with perfect play, you have to wonder if the Oregon style of offense is fit to provide enough points needed to beat a team like Ohio State. With a ground-and-pound running game in between the tackles and guards that is a better fit for an SEC-sized running back, the Ducks are asking CJ Verdell and Travis Dye to shoulder the load, both of whom stand under 5-foot-10, and 210 pounds. The bread-and-butter under Chip Kelly was bouncing it outside and allowing speed to carry you, but the Ducks have seemingly gone away from that under Mario Cristobal. I’m not saying that this style can’t work, but at some point, you can’t blame poor performance on execution any longer.

“It’s hard to put your finger on it because the energy was really good, the preparation was really good,” Cristobal said after the game. “We thought our physicality in pregame was well also. There’s enough in the execution where there are some big plays to be had, and we didn’t make them happen at times. Other times we did. So I don’t think it’s a matter of scheme or effort or want to, we’ve got to keep grinding at executing and the details that go with executing at a high level.”

It will not come as any sort of a shock to see Oregon’s offense improve drastically in the coming weeks. With a likely vanilla scheme in the opener to avoid showing their cards, coated in a layer of rust from the offseason, it’s too much to ask of them to be perfect. They weren’t the Ducks of old on Saturday, but they did enough to get the job done in the end.

Unfortunately, in our reactionary society that is quick to have an outlandish opinion on anything that strays outside of the expectation, calls for the quarterback’s job rain down at the first sign of trouble. That was extremely apparent on Saturday, with a chorus of fans on Twitter sending out a cry for Ty Thompson midway through the second quarter when Oregon punted for the third time of the day, only to recant the second Brown had a positive play. I present to you Exhibit A:

Getting mad at fans for this is a worthless venture; that’s simply what fanatics do. With an easy outlet to express their thoughts in the moment, social media has given a voice to the people who aren’t paid to play the game, allowing them to publicly criticize those who are qualified.

This is an unfortunate situation for Anthony Brown, who has the misfortune of being Oregon’s current quarterback when the future is waiting in the wing. He follows in the footsteps of Marcus Mariota and Justin Herbert, two Oregon legends who will headline Duck history lessons for decades to come.  That means that any time the offense struggles, he will be to blame.

Will that result in him losing his job at some point this season? It’s not something that we can rule out. But we saw on Saturday that even in moments when he is performing well enough to win, and doing his job, it’s likely not going to be enough to satisfy a passionate fanbase who is desperate to reach the level of quarterback play that reached high heights just years ago.

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5 questions we hope the Ducks answer vs. Fresno State on Saturday

Who is the first Ducks QB off of the bench? Which freshman CB looks more dominant? We hope to find answers to these questions and several more on Saturday.

The 2021 college football season has finally arrived.

While Week 0 officially kicked off last weekend, a slew of NCAA games are hitting the airwaves over the next couple of days, with Christmas morning coming on Saturday for Oregon fans, as the Ducks get set to take on the Fresno State Bulldogs at Autzen Stadium.

By the time 11 a.m. rolls around, it will have been 644 days since the Ducks played in front of a packed crowd, and the environment is going to be rocking.

There is a general assumption that the Ducks are going to be able to take care of business and handle Fresno State with some relative ease, but throughout the afternoon, we are going to be watching intently as things play out. We’ve seen Oregon at practice, and we’ve heard multiple reports from players and coaches alike, but at long last we finally get to see for ourselves what this team is going to look like. Here are 5 questions that we hope get answered: