On February 19 of next year, Oregon Ducks Football redshirt defensive back Daylen Austin will face a 12-man trial.

Austin is currently accused of Failure to Perform Duties of Driver, a Class B Felony. According to the Oregon Judicial Department online database, both the prosecuting team and Austin’s lawyers could not come to an agreement for a settlement yesterday, which leads this case to trial.

Austin’s trail will occur at 9:30 a.m. PST that morning.

In that hit-and-run incident, 46-year-old Frank William Seaman of Eugene was killed, which is why Austin’s charge is a class B felony.

According to the Eugene Police Department, the fatal incident occurred at West 4th and Polk on Monday, April 15 around 9:10 p.m. PDT.

“This is a complex investigation and EPD is still gathering information to be submitted to the Lane County District Attorney’s Office for a final charging decision,” the Eugene Police Department Facebook post said regarding this initial incident.

“I know Daylen’s character and I think there are a lot of details that will continue to play out. Beyond that, I’m not going to speak on it any more than that,” said Oregon Football head coach Dan Lanning in April about the incident.

There is currently no word on how these legal troubles will affect Austin’s status on the team.

Austin played three games and 33 snaps with the Ducks last season while utilizing a redshirt. He was a four-star high school recruit from Long Beach, California.

Oregon Ducks Football might be entering the Big Ten Conference among the favorites to win the league, but that doesn’t mean the old guard has to like it.

Michigan has reeled off three Big Ten titles in a row, finishing last season with a national title as well. Several popular betting sites have the Wolverines as third or fourth for best odds to win the league again, sometimes behind Penn State but never ahead of Oregon or Ohio State.

“Honestly, I don’t think that we care,” Michigan running back Donovan Edwards said. “I’d say we don’t care, in the sense that it’s us against everybody as it was last year.”

Edwards was joining former Wolverine tight end Jake Butt on his podcast, The L.A.B., where he was asked about the Buckeyes and Ducks being favored was a good motivator for the defending champs. The Wolverines lost their head coach, Jim Harbaugh, as well as nearly 20 players to the NFL.

“The way that I’ve been looking at it is, you can look at the offensive side of the ball — a lot of guys, including myself, haven’t been in a position to where your number is called on every single play,” Edwards said. “I want to be one of those guys where my number is called on every single play. I want the coaches to rely on me.

“It’s the same thing with all the guys on the offense. C-Love [tight end Colston Loveland] is the only returner on the offense, so it’s like — you want that pressure. You want that expectation, and guys are going to rise to that.”

Of course, talk in July won’t mean much when November rolls around. By then, Ohio State will have already travelled to Eugene (Oct. 12). Then in the final month of the regular season, the Ducks are in Ann Arbor on Nov. 2 with The Game slated for Nov. 30.

In the new Big Ten, Oregon could face either Ohio State or Michigan twice this fall. With the removal of divisions, the top two teams in the league standings will mean for the Big Ten Championship in Indianapolis on Dec. 7.

No matter who emerges from the round-robin between these three schools in the regular season, or who ultimately wins the Big Ten title, all three programs could see themselves in the College Football Playoff. An Oregon-Michigan rematch for the conference crown followed by an Oregon-Ohio State rematch for all the marbles? Count me in.

A fugitive was arrested this week in central Georgia after being on the run for nearly 30 years, authorities said. The man escaped from an Oregon prison in 1994 and subsequently stole the identity of a child who had died in Texas decades earlier, according to the U.S. Marshals Service.

Steven Craig Johnson was taken into custody Tuesday by members of a regional task force in Macon, Georgia, who found him at around 2 p.m. at an apartment complex in the city, the Marshals Service said in a news release. Now 70, Johnson had been living under the alias William Cox since 2011.

He fled from a prison work crew in Oregon on Nov. 29, 1994, while serving a state sentence for sexual abuse and sodomy. His convictions more specifically included three counts of first-degree sex abuse and one count of first-degree attempted sodomy, CBS affiliate KOIN-TV reported.

Johnson had been serving his sentence at the Mill Creek Correctional Facility in Salem, about halfway between Portland and Eugene, the Oregon Department of Corrections said. The Mill Creek facility was a minimum security prison located just a few miles outside of the city of Salem, on an unfenced property covering around 2,000 acres, according to the department. Before it closed in 2021, the facility housed roughly 290 inmates who were within four years of release.

Johnson was wanted on an arrest warrant for escape in Oregon, where he has been listed for years among six of the state’s most wanted people. A wanted poster for Johnson issued by the Oregon Department of Corrections noted Texas as one potential location where he had fled, although authorities did not give more details as to his connection to Texas, if any. The poster said Johnson is “a pedophile and presents a high probability of victimizing pre-teen boys.” It cautioned that he “should not be allowed contact with children.”

The Marshals Service said that it took on Johnson’s fugitive case in 2015 at the request of the Oregon Department of Corrections. After spending nine years trying to find him, the agency said that “new investigative technology employed by the Diplomatic Security Service” finally helped develop meaningful leads in 2024.

In addition to adopting a fake name, the investigation also revealed that Johnson had stolen the identity of a child after escaping prison. The child died in Texas in January 1962, the Marshals Service said. Johnson obtained a copy of the child’s birth certificate and, soon after, obtained a Social Security number in Texas in 1995. The earliest record of Johnson with a Georgia driver’s license came in 1998.

Following his arrest in Georgia, Johnson was booked into the Bibb County Jail in Macon. He is awaiting extradition back to Oregon.