After losing starting left tackle Tyler Johnstone to injury before the season started, Oregon’s offensive line was projected to still be okay with Andre Yruretagoyena taking over for the preseason all-American candidate in Johnstone.
Yruretagoyena wasn’t much help in replace of Johnstone but only because he went down injured in last week’s victory over Michigan State, thrusting true freshman Tyrell Crosby into the starting mix for this week’s game against Wyoming.
Fast forward to the first quarter of today’s game and sophomore Jake Fisher, a mainstay on Oregon’s depleted offensive line, goes down with an injury that saw him carted off the sidelines with ice on his knee.
In place of Fisher stepped former walk-on Matt Pierson, a graduate of Portland’s Jesuit high school, to help protect Marcus Mariota and Oregon’s vaunted rushing game.
“I was pretty happy with how I played,” Pierson said. “Obviously there’s a lot of things I got to work on but all-in-all, I thought we prepared well as a team and it was just a matter of falling back on that preparation.”
Not only did Pierson help ease the pain of losing Fisher, he helped lead the way for an Oregon rushing attack that ran for 263 yards and racked up 556 yards of total offense against Wyoming, not to mention receiving praise from all-American center Hroniss Grasu
“I have all the trust in the world in Matt Pierson,” Grasu said. “Just the way he prepares every single day, like he’s a starter, that just puts a lot of trust from me to him.”
With three lineman now injured and at least two of them out for a significant amount of time (unsure as of now how long Fisher will be out for), one of Oregon’s strongest groups have had to live by the philosophy of “next man up,” and have done so in a convincing manner.
“Next man up; it is what it is,” Oregon offensive line coach Steve Greatwood said about the rash of injuries plaguing the Ducks offensive line. “We’ve trained other kids; we’ll get some new guys into some new stuff and we’ll figure it out from there.”
Oregon has averaged 243 yards rushing on the ground, 330 yards per game through the air and scored an average of 52 points per game, not a bad stat line for an offensive line that has seen so many changes in the past four weeks.
When Fisher went down early in the game and Pierson came on to replace him, the Ducks were left with just three of their original starting lineman from the first game of the year while having five of their “two-deep” roster be underclassmen. Although that’s not the ideal scenario a coach would like when so much of his game plan is predicated on the lineman making correct calls and seeing the same calls, it’s a benefit to the the Ducks and the way they conduct themselves in practice.
“I think our offensive line meshes really well,” Pierson said. “We all practice really well together and treat it like a game-time situation so that helps us a lot when we are out on the field together.”
Greatwood, in his 28th season with the Ducks and 23rd coaching the offensive line, has been through a situation like this before when multiple offensive lineman went down hurt.
“I remember back in the ’94 season, it’s probably since the ’94 season when we went to the Rose Bowl, that I’ve had this rash of injuries,” Greatwood said. “We managed to pull through it and win the conference so we’ve been down this road before and we’ll find the right combinations out there.”