There were endless storylines and questions to ask going into the spring football season for the Oregon Ducks. With a long list of veterans returning for a final year after the way last season ended, plus the growing number of young stars set to contribute in major ways, Eugene was a hotbed for conversation in the month of March and April.
Chief among them, though, was the offense, and what changes we might see from it. After Will Stein left to take over as the head coach of the Kentucky Wildcats, former Oregon TE coach Drew Mehringer was promoted to the offensive coordinator role at Oregon, and this spring would be his first with play-calling duties in Eugene.
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What would that change bring? How would it show itself in the spring game? Would Oregon’s prolific offense of 2023, 2024, or 2025 be any different now in 2026?
The short answer is ‘no.’ Why? Because Dan Lanning foresaw this ongoing coordinator churn, and he set out early to put a plan in place to deal with it.
That plan was setting up the “Oregon Offense.”
“It really started from the beginning,” Lanning said earlier this spring. “Since we’ve been here, we wanted to install the Oregon offense.”
The Oregon Offense is a baseline. No matter who is calling plays, there are core tenets: run the ball, feed the studs, and create explosive plays. Whether that comes through bubble screens, crossing routes, or four-verticals, the philosophy never changes.
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As the new OC, Mehringer knows this well. It’s helpful, of course, that he was around when the core offense was being built in 2022 and has seen its evolution step by step.
“Coach Mehringer has been here for the entire thing,” Lanning said. “The great thing about being in-house is that it allows us to continue that continuity, like we built a system, right? Our system has a lot of answers. It has a lot of tools.”
That doesn’t mean that Mehringer has his hands tied as a play-caller, and that he is bound to do things the same way both Kenny Dillingham and Will Stein did. His own wrinkles can be added, but the core of the system will stay the same. Over the next year, Mehringer may show a propensity to lean on the deep ball, or out-routes, or comebacks; no matter what his “thing” is, you can still expect the Ducks‘ offense to rely heavily on the run and on finding success through chunk plays.
Many fans rejoiced after the Oregon spring game when it became clear that the number of bubble screens and negative-yard throws had been reduced, a sticking point for many during the Stein regime. Are they completely out of the offense? Probably not, but being less reliant on them may be part of the Mehringer regime.
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“This offseason, we’re going to add new things that we haven’t done in the past, and build off of that and build to our players’ skill set,” Lanning said. “But this is something that will always be growing, always be changing, but always be consistent.”
For Mehringer, it’s the player that matters the most. Dante Moore may be able to do things that Bo Nix didn’t do, while Dillon Gabriel may have excelled at certain things that wouldn’t work with the Ducks’ 2026 personnel. The trick every year is finding what works for the current roster and turning that into a strength.
That starts with the quarterback. As long as he is comfortable with the offense, you can start to build. But getting on the same page with him early on is what lays the groundwork for success.
“I think the guy with the ball, you have to see the game through his lens,” Mehringer said this spring. “I think for us, what are we trying to do? We’re trying to put our players in the best positions possible, but make sure that they see the game the same way that we do. And really, do we see the game the same way that they do? If there needs to be growth, it can happen on both sides.”
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That’s an area where Oregon has an advantage going into 2026. Moore is returning for his second year as the starter and his third year with the “Oregon Offense” in general. Earlier this spring, Lanning confessed that Moore “is there” with the likes of Nix and Gabriel when it comes to mastery of the offense, able to make checks at the line, audible into and out of sets, and orchestrate the offense as a whole on a string like a marionette with a cannon for an arm.
In 2025, the Ducks’ offense was excellent, ranking 13th in points per game and 12th in yards per game. Moore was among the favorites to win the Heisman Trophy going into the final month of the season, and was widely projected to be a top-10 pick had he declared for the 2026 NFL Draft. It’s safe to say that in order for Mehringer to have a successful first season as OC at Oregon, he doesn’t need to do too much to upset the apple cart.
“We’ve tweaked a few things and given Dante some things that I think help him see things,” Mehringer said. “I think we’ll probably do that every year, because every iteration of the offense will be a little bit different, just because of personnel changes.”
The concept in general may seem simple — obviously, “keeping things status quo” is about as baseline as you can get — but the idea of a core offense with tweaks available is less prevalent in college football than you may think. Many times over, we’ve seen offensive coordinators come into new teams and go through a makeover that alters what a team does. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
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When you have dealt with and are expecting to deal with as much coordinator turnover as Lanning has, a plan needs to be put into place, though. Fortunately, he saw two of his mentors — Nick Saban and Kirby Smart — do something similar to what he is now.
“Getting to watch Nick and Kirby both, there were things that you walked away with,” Lanning said. “It’s evolved over time. It started with all of us on offense and Kenny (Dillingham) bringing some pieces that we wanted to have, but there were some non-negotiables that we knew we wanted in there.”
So far, the plan has worked well for Lanning and the Ducks. His first two hires at OC have not only gotten head-coaching jobs but also landed them at their dream schools. Meanwhile, Oregon has continued to have great success and take things a step further in the postseason each year. If the trend continues, they will find themselves playing for a national championship this year.
If that happens? The Ducks could be looking for a new OC sooner rather than later.
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“If we continue to win games, guess what? We’ll have more guys to become head coaches on our staff, and that’s a win for us, right?” Lanning said. “But ultimately, we want to be able to keep and maintain the Oregon offense, the Oregon defense. What does that look like as we develop it and adjust it?”
It looks a lot like what we’ve grown accustomed to seeing over the years in Eugene: success, but with a little twist.
This article originally appeared on Ducks Wire: Oregon Ducks’ elite offense not at risk of change under new OC
