Oregon Ducks fans were given the news they have been fearing this week, with wide receiver Evan Stewart’s knee injury looking just about as serious as could have been expected.
The 21-year-old suffered an injury during pre-season training and is now set to miss a significant portion of the 2025 campaign, perhaps even all of it, which means head coach Dan Lanning has some serious reorganizing to take care of.
The Ducks already saw Tez Johnson leave for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the NFL Draft, and Traeshon Holden to the Dallas Cowboys, having not been selected before moving as a free agent, leaving Lanning very short on receivers.
On top of this, quarterback Dillon Gabriel was drafted by the Cleveland Browns, which will also make it very hard for the Ducks to come close to the levels they hit last time around.
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Stewart caught 48 passes for five touchdowns and 613 yards and would have been perhaps Lanning’s number one option for 2025, and the 39-year-old head coach will now have to consider his options.
The Ducks went 12-0 in the regular season in 2024 before eventually being downed by Ohio State in the Rose Bowl, 41-21, with the Buckeyes going on to win the national title by narrowly defeating Notre Dame 24-23 in Atlanta, Georgia.
The absence of Stewart means the likes of Justius Lowe, Dakorien Moore, and Kenyon Sadiq will need to step up. As for Lanning’s future in the game, be it at the college or NFL level, by all accounts, discussions with legend Nick Saban have helped point him in the right direction.
“I actually visited with Coach (Saban) just the other day,”
“More than anything, I bounce a lot of thoughts off of him and see if he has any insight because this guy has a ton of experience. He’s the best coach to ever do it. I think he has an unbelievable ability to look at things from a backseat approach, big picture view, see how it affects the program, and then stand his guns on certain things that he thinks are non-negotiable.”
“I think (Saban) has done a good job, for me at least, detailing, ‘Hey, what are your non-negotiables?’ Oregon football looks like this, dot, dot, dot. What’s it look like? And me figuring out, OK, I have to be Dan. I can’t be Nick (Saban). I can’t be Kirby (Smart) or Mike Norvell,” Lanning added.
Lanning is considered a hot prospect and is likely to make a name for himself in the NFL sooner rather than later, albeit the former linebacker seems reticent about such a jump, responding to questions as to whether he wants to coach in the NFL.
“No. I used to want to. I think you figure out where do you really fit?. Like, where’s your niche? And I do feel like this age group is the group that I connect with unbelievably,”
One imagines that he will, at some point, be tempted by the allure of the NFL, albeit such a switch would be easier to accept having led the Ducks to a national title first.
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