The No. 1 Oregon football team will look to cap a perfect regular season at home this week against rival Washington at Autzen Stadium Saturday night.

The game is set to kick off at 4:30 p.m.

Here are some highlights from Oregon coach Dan Lanning’s weekly press conference Monday night.

Oregon football’s Dan Lanning talks Washington QBs Will Rogers and Demond Williams Jr.

Washington has played two quarterbacks — fifth-year senior Will Rogers and true freshman Demond Williams Jr. — all season, but will keep who it plans to start against the Ducks secret until game time Saturday.

No matter who starts for the Huskies, the Ducks are going to prepare for both.

“This is a team that’s played multiple quarterbacks throughout the season so we’ve seen a little bit of both guys and they’ve had times where they’ve had both guys out on the field at the same time,” Lanning said. “I don’t know that it presents a huge challenge, either way we were going to prepare for both because they’ve utilized both throughout the year.”

Mississippi State transfer Rogers has started every game this season for the Huskies but has struggled in recent weeks. The senior has completed over 70% of his passes but with just 14 touchdowns and seven interceptions. The freshman Williams took over for Rogers in the second half of Washington’s recent 31-19 win over UCLA and impressed. He has 369 passing yards, 217 rushing yards and four total touchdowns.

“He’s a guy that can operate, he has great athleticism but he can make great throws as well,” Lanning said of Williams. “I don’t see a huge change in their system. They’re both guys that can operate the system. I think he just becomes a threat from a run game standpoint with what he can do with his legs. They do a good job of matching their scheme to those guys’ traits and skillset.”

Dan Lanning speaks on rivalry with Washington and what it means to him

Lanning, who has yet to beat the Huskies in his two seasons at the helm in Eugene and most recently lost to Washington in the Pac-12 Championship last season, downplayed what kind of motivation recent history would give the Ducks.

Lanning said that rivalries is what makes college football special, but also said that Saturday’s game was another opportunity to get better.

“Ultimately, it is another game, it’s the next game,” Lanning said. “You don’t get out there playing with emotion, it’s about execution over emotion. These games are going to have emotion, that’s the way these games are played, but that’s not what’s going to lead to success on the field.”

When asked whether he thinks his players would be more motivated due to Washington’s recent three-game win streak against the Ducks, Lanning once again said that “motivation is overrated.”

“It’s always about performance,” Lanning said. “It’s always about what we’re able to do on the field. Motivation is overrated. Our guys have to want to go out there and execute at a really high level. Since the beginning of the season we’ve talked about playing our best football at the end of November. We’re there. This is our opportunity to go play our best football against a good team.”

Lanning and Oregon’s players last season aren’t the only ones with potentially extra desire to beat this specific team. Oregon cornerback Jabbar Muhammad, a former Husky, will face his former team for the first time on Saturday as a rival.

“I’m sure it means a ton,” Lanning said of Muhammad. “In fact, I know it means a ton. He knows that it’s more about going out there and executing than anything else.”

Dan Lanning on UW coach Jedd Fisch: ‘They adapt to the personnel that they have’

Though the Ducks and Huskies have had tight battles in each of the last three meetings, UW’s team in 2024 is strikingly different from the team that suited up in purple in 2022 and 2023.

Washington returned just 40 players from its national title runner-up team a year ago, along with most of its coaching staff, which is led by former Arizona coach Jedd Fisch.

Lanning was complimentary of Fisch, who he had played against before while he was at Arizona, and the job he’s done in Seattle this season.

“What they’ve always done a good job of is adapting to the personnel that they have and taking advantage of it,” Lanning said. “You see things that cause stress on both sides of the ball. It’s obviously a different defense now that they’re running at Washington but they still cause stress. They make it tough for you to game plan because they have answers in their scheme and again they make an impact out there on the field.”

Alec Dietz covers University of Oregon football, volleyball, women’s basketball and baseball for The Register-Guard. You may reach him at adietz@registerguard.com and you can follow him on X @AlecDietz.

The Washington Nationals are heading into the winter with the potential to make some big splashes to improve their team. 

It was another tough season for the Nationals in 2024 with just 71 wins. However, the team featured a lot of talented young players and the lengthy rebuild could come to an end soon. 

Due to Washington having a big difference between their payroll now and their payroll last season, the team could be spending a lot of money on free agents this winter.  In fact, one estimate noted the Nationals could field a team with a payroll of $35 million if they made no offseason acquisitions.

It’s just one reason why many experts are bullish on the Nats adding some veterans around the young core, which makes a lot of sense to help improve the roster. The Nationals have a few positions where adding those players makes a lot of sense. 

One of the positions that is arguably the biggest need is at first base. There are a lot of potential players to pursue in free agency that could make sense. One player who could be the top option is Pete Alonso. 

The slugging first baseman is arguably the best player at the position, and should have plenty of suitors. However, Alonso is not a perfect player and Zachary D. Rymer of Bleacher Report highlighted why he could have bust potential. 

“How big of a deal is it that Alonso is coming off his worst season?,” he wrote. “It was his worst according to his .788 OPS, anyway, and there are real issues underneath that number. A career-high rate of ground balls is one. He also didn’t pull as many fly balls as he usually does. More generally, the aging curve for right-handed-hitting, right-handed-throwing first basemen is rough. Even Albert Pujols didn’t last long as a star after turning 30, and Alonso will arrive at that point on December 7.”

Since coming up to the Majors, the 29-year-old has been one of the best power hitters in baseball, with only Aaron Judge having more home runs during that span. 

Even though he has been an excellent power hitter, 2024 was a down season for a player going into a contract year, at least by his standards. Alonso saw a drop in home runs and OPS in 2024, which could be concerning for a player about to turn 30. 

The Nationals have had some bad misses recently on big contracts with Patrick Corbin and Stephen Strasburg. Washington hasn’t made any big moves recently, as they have been waiting for their young core to develop, along with the costs of those contracts to come off the books.

With a lot of young, talented players, the time to strike in free agency and make a splash seems like it should be now for the Nationals. However, if they target Alonso, they have to be mindful that he could be a bust with a drop in power numbers. 

As soon as the game ended in the Washington Commanders’ Week 11 loss to the Philadelphia Eagles conversations started shifting toward the long break and how much time the team had before it could get rid of that bad feeling against the Dallas Cowboys.

Now, following another Commanders loss – to the hands of those Cowboys – and even more bad feelings stemming from it, while some are talking about if this team can get right against the Tennessee Titans it’s going to be critical they take their time to fully digest their third-straight loss first.

Washington receiver Terry McLaurin made a point of emphasizing this fact in his postgame conversation with local media following the Week 12 loss.

“I don’t want to look too far to Sunday because Sunday’s going to take care of itself next week,” McLaurin said. “We got to get some things fixed in the film room, so we’re already looking forward to looking at the film and just having ‘Tell the Truth Monday’ like (head coach Dan Quinn) says. I mean we all got to look at ourselves in the mirror and figure out what we can do better.”

To McLaurin’s point, as a team the Commanders have to get better, especially on offense where the unit failed to score on two possessions starting in the Dallas end of the field after defensive and special teams plays set the group up for early success.

Across the organization Sunday night the message of everyone coming together to fix the issues was common. From coaches to players the unit is focused on fixing the unit, but it is going to take some hard-focused individual advancement to do that as well.

“I just want to continue to try to control what I can and keep making sure that we have the right attitude and approach as we come into practice and the games,” McLaurin said. “Trying to make a play when the ball comes to me and just controlling that aspect of my job, and I try to provide a spark when I can. …As an offense, we have to find a better job of staying on the field. I think that was a strength of ours in the first half of the season and it’s not right now. So we got to figure out how to get that back to being a strength of our offense because when we’re tempo, when we’re staying on the field, it allows us to keep the playbook open and continue to put pressure on the defense.”

McLaurin also said nobody is hanging their heads on this team right now. That they still have confidence in what they can do individually and as a team.

While that wasn’t physically true on Sunday after the game – there were plenty of heads hanging in the home locker room after the loss – it is true from a mentality standpoint. Even the multiple guys who put the loss fully on their own shoulders, kicker Austin Seibert and safety Jeremy Reaves just to name a couple, echoed the sentiment that they are and can be better.

So don’t expect this Washington squad to give up on itself even as some start to move it out of the competitive conversations it was in just weeks ago. And if every Commanders player on the roster and coach on the staff takes the same approach McLaurin is conveying here, then there’s another chance to see the old production come back in Week 13 – when the time comes.

Stick with CommanderGameday and the Locked On Commanders podcast for more FREE coverage of the Washington Commanders throughout the 2024 season.

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