What To Make of Dante Moore's Injury and This Week's CFB Slate

Ryan Rubinstein (0:01)

Welcome to the Off The Charts Football Podcast. I'm your host, Ryan Rubinstein. I'm joined today by a member of our ops team, Andrew Oja, and a member of our R&D team, Alex Vigderman. And we got a great show for you guys today. We'll be recapping the last couple of weeks of college football, week three and week four, as well as looking ahead to some week five matchups. We're done with non-conference play. We're entering, now it's October. We're getting into conference play, and in the spirit of spooky season, Oregon is seemingly back from the dead.

They beat USC by 14 points, 41 to 27 Dante Moore got a little banged up. That was probably one of the games of the weekend. Alex, what do you have to say about this Dante Moore injury? Are they going to be able to overcome this? It didn't seem too bad, but is Riola productive enough to be a comparable replacement there?

Alex Vigderman (0:48)

Yeah, it's one of those injuries where you see it initially. It obviously looks bad. It's bad enough that USC suspends their own player for it. And this is where we track a lot of stuff from an injury standpoint. And there's a pretty big discrepancy between what it looks like and the actual prognosis. Setting aside, of course, the idea that concussions are going to potentially last lifetime in a way that an ankle injury that has the same return to play expectation doesn't. So that's the biggest concern I have for Moore at this point. The prognosis is actually more like a couple of weeks than they have a bye this week. So he could be back without missing time. Guys who have that kind of getting carted off on a stretcher ambulance type of treatment for a concussion, still a third of the time come back without any missed time. So it would be entirely normal for him to be back for a game in two weeks.

And the return to play, I looked for some trends in what to expect from quarterbacks after they return from a concussion, looking for things like, is their accuracy worse? Do they scramble less? Do they just drop back less? Are they just, does the offense get structured a little differently? Are they not dropping back as deep? Because you want to get the ball out quickly, that sort of thing. That was the one thing I found was that the snap to throw time, both in terms of the sort of expected to snap to throw time based on the depth of the drop, and then also just how they got rid of the ball compared to that expectation. Both of those things at the college level are faster coming out of an injury than they were heading into the concussion. So, I do think- Faster, you say? Yeah. So, as in like they get rid of the ball quicker after the injury, basically with the idea that I don't want to get touched.

To be clear, the difference here is small. We're talking about smaller than the gap between a three-step drop and a five-step drop, but it is for an offense that was already operating at roughly an average speed, and Moore was getting the ball out quickly relative to that expectation. If you nudge that a little bit further towards the fast end of the spectrum, we start talking about offenses that are generally a little bit more capped in terms of their downfield upside and that sort of thing. So that's the one concern I think I have from an Oregon offense standpoint, is just you get a little bit more conservative treatment by the offensive coaching staff and also how Moore handles the injury coming out of it.

Andrew Oja (3:18)

That's very interesting to me from the perspective of just the timing going down. I would think that it logically, what you said makes complete sense. They don't want to get hit again, right?

Alex Vigderman (3:27)

Yeah.

Andrew Oja (3:27)

My first thought, though, was that maybe brain fog, the timing might go up. So it's interesting that there's a drop-up. But again, that makes total sense.

Alex Vigderman (3:38)

I think you could see it both ways, where the processing, yeah, it's slower to process, but also you could basically make it so that you don't have to process. The thing that we talk about with Tuatega Vailoa at the NFL level is just like, he doesn't even have to think. He just gets rid of the ball as quickly as possible. And so that part of it actually might make it easier.

Andrew Oja (3:56)

It makes sense. That makes sense. It's a fun way to look at that. Overall, in the game, man, Oregon's pass rush, they got home early, but then they got shut out the rest of the day. And then it was like an offensive slugfest back and forth. There's a lot of fun to watch. A lot of fun to watch. Tied at 27 in the fourth. So there was, you know, good game. End of the day, Maiva, though, he didn't really show up down the stretch in those key moments. They had a turnover on downs. He had three straight incompletions to seal that drive.