While Thursday marked the start of the Oregon Ducks men’s basketball team’s postseason, it also marked the start of Oregon football’s spring season. Each college football program nationwide is allotted 15 spring practices a year, and the Ducks held their first on Thursday morning.
Oregon’s team has changed a lot since New Year’s Day when it lost to the Ohio State Buckeyes in the Rose Bowl and College Football Playoff. Next fall, Oregon will have a new starting quarterback, running back, top wide receivers, and an overhauled defense. All that turnover leads to some uncertainty for the Ducks, but as Ducks Head Coach Dan Lanning said after his team’s practice on Thursday, Oregon’s lack of experience doesn’t equate to a lack of talent or capability.
Although he was less aggressive than he has been in past years, Lanning looked to the transfer portal this offseason to fill the few holes in Oregon’s program, bringing in several elite transfers. Perhaps Oregon’s most important transfer pickup was Purdue safety Dillon Thieneman, who 247Sports rated as the No. 1 transfer safety this cycle. A junior, Thieneman came to Purdue as a 3-star recruit in 2023 before working his way toward becoming one of the top safeties in college football.
The early returns of Thieneman’s time in Eugene have been impressive, says Lanning.
“He’s infatuated with the extra work,” Lanning said of Thieneman after practice on Thursday. “There’s probably not a day that goes by that he’s not in the weight room, getting bonus work, doing extra rehab, getting extra film. His intelligence, all those things are really picking up, you know, establishing some standards for the DB group and how they’re going to operate.”
There wasn’t one single reason the Ducks lost to Ohio State in the Rose Bowl — the Buckeyes dominated every facet of the game — but one…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/article/dan-lanning-says-dillon-thieneman-200230609.html
Author : Ducks Wire
Publish date : 2025-03-13 20:02:00
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