The pressure has been on the Oregon Ducks' defense to keep the team in games since Dante Moore went down with a concussion. To its credit, the defense has stepped up, limiting opposing offenses and setting the Ducks up with great scoring opportunities and chances to win the game in the fourth quarter.
The dam started to break last week on the road at Illinois, as the Illini found success on the ground and hurt the Ducks' defense in the second half. The bad news: Oregon is going to face an even better rushing attack this weekend, as the Northwestern Wildcats march into Autzen Stadium with an offense that is humming.
Former Oregon head coach and current Northwestern offensive coordinator Chip Kelly has been the secret sauce for the Wildcats this
season, not only finding ways to run the ball out of a variety of formations, but also getting the best out of his senior quarterback, Aidan Chiles.
Northwestern spreads the ball out well and makes everyone on the field a threat. Kelly's tendency to run the ball using the Wing-T offense, wide splits and counter has been the engine for the offense this season, while Chiles has continued to grow in the spread offense and has thrown 12 touchdowns against just one interception.
Dan Lanning is familiar with the former Oregon play-callers' tendencies, having faced Kelly in the past when he was at Ohio State and UCLA. But that doesn't make the game prep this week any easier.
"I think that the great thing about Chip is he always does an unbelievable job of utilizing his personnel and finding things that they do at a really high level," Lanning said on Monday. "So there are things you're seeing at Northwestern now that they haven't done in the past anywhere that he's been, and then there are wrinkles that are like, 'OK, that's a Chip play. That's an identity play that he's kind of always carried in his future or in his past.' So you see a little bit of elements of both."
Kelly has been around in both college football and the NFL long enough to pick up some new ideas to add to his up-tempo spread offense that he popularized with the Ducks. He uses motion and misdirection to run the ball between the tackles, with wide splits. Kelly finds ways to get his quarterbacks on the motion on run-pass option plays. Northwestern routinely uses the entire field with wide formations to spread the defense out.
There is a lot to prepare for, and it's a key reason why Northwestern is off to a surprising 6-1 start this season, and although the Oregon defense has been much better in recent weeks, this will be one of the tallest tasks of the season.
"It's like I kind of described before: It's almost like you're playing three different offenses," Lanning said. "The new wrinkles that he has at Northwestern, some of the old flavor that he has that he's carried all the way to his time back here at Oregon. There's always going to be something new when you walk into a game that it's going to be like he's never put this on film. He might not know how you're going to line up against it, and you have to figure it out there within the rules of your defense and how you execute."
Oregon will try to crack the code on Kelly's offense when Northwestern comes to Autzen Stadium on Halloween, with kickoff set for 12:30 p.m. PT.
This article originally appeared on Ducks Wire: Dan Lanning: Facing Chip Kelly is like preparing for 3 offenses
