This is how hard it is to win a national championship.
In 2025 the defending champion Ohio State Buckeyes featured four of the first 11 picks in the 2026 NFL Draft. Though they had the best player in college football in Jeremiah Smith, a 77 percent passer and a 1000-yard rusher, they still lost in the quarterfinals of the College Football Playoff, 24-14 to Mario Cristobal and Miami, a team that barely got in.
Yet this season Dan Lanning at Oregon is trying to win his program's first with two new coordinators, both hired in-house. He passed up the transfer portal at offensive line and linebacker, taking just one player, Michael Bennett III, a right tackle from FCS Yale and a former zero-star recruit.
It's a bold set of moves, trusting the growth of the people in your organization, but Lanning is known for them. Last season the Ducks went for it on fourth down 32 times, converting 18 of them, a success rate that ranked 10th in the Big Ten and 57th in the nation. Though decisive and dynamic, Lanning is clearly not infallible, just the best young coach in college football at 48-8.
His push-the-chips-in move for this season was hiring Drew Mehringer and Chris Hampton as offensive and defensive coordinators, two assistants that were already on his staff. Hampton has a track record. He coached a Top 25 defense at Tulane in 2021 and called plays.
Mehringer hasn't called plays or served as an offensive coordinator since 2016 at Rutgers, where a talent-poor offense finished 127th of 128 teams in Division I football.
He's grown since then in his knowledge of offense, and coaching the Oregon attack is a collaborative effort with superlative tools at your disposal. This season he's dialing up plays for perhaps the best quarterback in college football in Dante Moore, who'll be throwing to the best receiver corps in the nation featuring tight end Jeremiah Johnson, wide receivers Evan Stewart, Dakorien Moore, Jeremiah McClellan and Iverson Hooks, with 10.12 sprinter Gatlin Bair sprinkled in, plus inside and outside terrors Jordon Davison and Dierre Hill at running back.
The other big gamble comes at linebacker. Two years in a row now Lanning and Chief of Operations Marshall Malchow have stood pat in the middle of the defense, trusting the development of the players in the program.
Unless Devon Jackson and the young linebackers take a leap forward, the scheme falls apart
Hampton faces a serious challenge with enormous expectations. The Ducks rank third in the country in the post spring composite at SuperWest Sports, and the defense is expected to be a decisive strength as they return all four starters on the defensive line, Jerry Mixon at linebacker and three in the secondary plus the addition of Minnesota safety Koi Perich, a two-year starter for the Golden Gophers and a former freshman All-American.
Even with all this talent there's one daunting challenge, a production gap. In Bryce Boettcher, Dillon Thieneman and Jadon Canady, all departed for the NFL, Hampton has to replace 271 tackles, five interceptions and four forced fumbles.
For the defense to work and be national championship-level disruptive, those plays have to come from somewhere. Whether senior Devon Jackson, Dylan Williams, Brayden Platt or Gavin Nix, one of the in-house linebackers has go from a bit role or an injury-plagued start to become an impact player.
Mixon is a dogged veteran who has improved each year, 57 tackles and two interceptions in 2025. He's in line to wear the green dot this season.
In spring practice and the Spring Game Devon Jackson showed signs of becoming the player Oregon fans hoped he'd be when he came to Eugene from Omaha, Nebraska with 10.57 speed in the 100, a state champion sprinter.
Though he's battled injuries throughout his college career Jackson has played in 44 games for the Ducks with three starts. The light seems to have come on. This offseason he switched to number 9. He's playing downhill and making knock-back tackles.
Devon Jackson TFL pic.twitter.com/Y7BM6ykehY
— FD (@flooduck) April 25, 2026
Interviewed in April by the media pool Jackson said, "If I don't make it happen this year, then I'm going to be a regular guy, and I feel like I'm too talented to be that. I feel like I've still got a lot of football left in my life to just let it go in a year. The emphasis for me is to treat every day like it's my last. It's do or die. It's my last one. There's nothing left to hold back."
Not to add to the pressure, but that attitude sounds very Boettcher-like. If Jackson takes some big swings in 2026, the Duck defense might have the requisite amount of pop. National championship teams play stifling defense.
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