The Mario Cristobal years at Oregon are over, and the roster he built has been cleared out. As those recruits moved on to the NFL or the Transfer Portal, Dan Lanning and his staff have taken over a program that now belongs entirely to them.
Cristobal’s Ducks went 35-13 overall and 23-9 in Pac-12 play, and the closest they came to the College Football Playoff was in 2019. The pandemic-shortened 2020 season slowed things down, and back-to-back blowouts at the hands of Utah in 2021 kept Oregon from breaking through under Cristobal. Looking back, the biggest what-ifs are tied to the five-star talent that never quite hit its ceiling in Eugene.
Justin Flowe sits at the top of that list. The linebacker arrived in the 2020 recruiting class with a mountain of hype, the kind that made his high school tape look unfair.
Oregon beat out Clemson, Miami, and USC for him, and at the time it felt like a massive win for the Ducks. But that commitment ended up being the high point of his Oregon run.
A leg injury slowed his development and cost him most of the 2021 season, and in 2022 he started only two games before transferring. Since leaving Oregon, Flowe has shown flashes at Arizona and UNLV, but the superstar trajectory never really materialized.
Ty Thompson came in with a different kind of pressure. As a five-star quarterback in the 2021 class, the Arizona native was supposed to be the future.
Oregon landed him as the 31st ranked player in the country, and the expectation was obvious: this was the next guy. Instead, Thompson spent his lone season under Cristobal as Anthony Brown’s backup, throwing just 15 passes.
When Dan Lanning arrived, he brought Bo Nix with him, and Thompson lost another quarterback battle. He never started a game for Oregon, and his career took an even stranger turn after that, with just one start at quarterback for Tulane before he converted to tight end.
Kingsley Suamataia rounds out the group. Oregon pulled the offensive tackle out of Utah in the 2021 class, landing the nation’s 20th ranked player and fifth ranked offensive tackle.
But injuries and freshman growing pains limited him to one game for the Ducks, and he entered the Transfer Portal in October of 2021. Suamataia went on to have a successful college career at BYU and was later taken in the second round of the 2024 NFL Draft by the Kansas City Chiefs.
In the end, Oregon and Suamataia both moved on just fine, but his brief stop in Eugene still fits the theme: elite talent that never had the chance to become elite production for Cristobal’s Ducks.
In Other News...
Oregon Is Facing The One Debate Ducks Fans Are Tired Of
Oregon has spent plenty of time hearing the same question since joining the Big Ten: can the Ducks really handle being the leagues standard-bearer? Brandon Walker revived that debate by pointing to Oregons recent playoff disappointments, the kind of outside noise that tends to follow a program with championship expectations. For a team that has already had to answer for its place in a new conference, it is the sort of conversation the Ducks would rather leave behind.
Inside the building, the message is much simpler. Dante Moore framed his motivation around the people around him, not rankings or public narratives, and that is the mindset Oregon has leaned on as it tries to turn Big Ten status into Big Ten authority. Dan Lannings job is to keep the group insulated from the chatter, and the Ducks know the easiest way to quiet the debate is to handle business on the field when the season opens against Boise State. [Read more 🡒]
Dante Moore Just Weighed In On Auburn's Place In Rivalry History
Dante Moore has a front-row view of what makes college footballs biggest rivalries matter, and the Oregon quarterback recently put his own stamp on the conversation. As one of the cover athletes for EA Sports College Football 2027 and the first Ducks player on the games cover since Joey Harrington in 2002, Moore weighed in on the sports most heated matchups and included Oregon-Washington among the elite group, alongside Alabama-Auburn and Michigan-Ohio State.
For Oregon fans, his perspective carries a little extra weight because it comes after the Ducks 2025 win at Washington, a result that snapped a long Seattle drought and underscored how much that series still means. Moores take also serves as a reminder that while the national powers get plenty of attention, Oregons rivalry with Washington has earned a place in the same conversation, even if the debate over where it fits in the hierarchy is far from settled. [Read more 🡒]