EUGENE, Ore. — It’s a midsummer day in July, and Oregon‘s present and future at the quarterback position are fittingly passing each other inside the brightly lit hallways of the Marcus Mariota Performance Center.
Dillon Gabriel and Dante Moore dap each other up and go their separate ways. Gabriel, the 23-year-old from Hawai’i who has been in college since 2019 and is about to play for his third program. Moore, the 19-year-old who was born in Cleveland, played high school football in Detroit and is suiting up for his second season on his second team.
Despite being at different stages of their career, Gabriel and Moore found common ground in what appealed to them about Oregon — a place where they had seen a quarterback like Bo Nix become the best version of himself while winning.
Gabriel’s journey is a peculiar one. He went from Oahu to UCF before making his way to Oklahoma and eventually, back toward the Pacific. It made him one of the longer tenured players in the sport and one of the most experienced. Over the course of six seasons, Gabriel has thrown 1,831 passes for over 16,000 yards. For reference, Oklahoma State‘s Alan Bowman — who has been in college since 2018 — has thrown for 6,000 fewer yards.
“It’s hard to find that type of experience,” offensive coordinator Will Stein said. “Everywhere he goes, he wins. He won in high school, he has won in college. He’s played in the biggest settings in college football.”
For Stein and head coach Dan Lanning, the option to bring in Gabriel was a no-brainer. His Hawaiian roots and experience watching former Oregon great and Hawai’i native Marcus Mariota was a bonus. For Gabriel, however, his first decision following his most productive season yet while at Oklahoma was whether or not to go to the NFL. As Gabriel explained it, once he decided to forego the draft, he wanted to make a different move. Oklahoma had been great for him, but with his offensive coordinator Jeff Lebby leaving to take a head-coaching job at Mississippi State and the Sooners being a younger team, he decided to find a new home.
“It wasn’t the best timing,” Gabriel said of Oklahoma. “But when it came to Oregon, I’ve never been so decisive and clear of what I wanted. When I was on the phone with them, I was already envisioning myself there.”
The Ducks are 5-0 this season as Gabriel is well on his way to another season of over 3,000 passing yards while being the most efficient quarterback in the country. However, Oregon has also shown it’s not quite operating at the level that it did with Nix last season. Though they are back at No. 3 in the AP poll, the Ducks dropped after struggling to beat Idaho and Boise State early in their first two games. Key statistics like red zone conversion and explosive plays from scrimmage are down from 2023, too.
“We can be better,” Lanning said after the Ducks’ win over Oregon State. After taking down UCLA, he reiterated the notion. “I see all the things we can get better at,” he said when asked about the win.
With No. 2 Ohio State coming to Eugene this week for what could be the biggest matchup in the new-look Big Ten this season, Gabriel is about to lead Oregon on a stretch of games that includes at least three ranked teams and another rival in Washington as it hopes to not just reach the College Football Playoff for the first time under Lanning, but also put itself in a position to win it all. As Lanning has said before, those are the expectations in Eugene. It’s part of why Gabriel transferred teams for one last ride.
“I had clear goals for myself and that’s winning a national championship and putting myself in the best spot to do so,” Gabriel said. “You get all you want here — the offensive fit, the surrounding cast and the team and a coach who believes and that chance to win the national championship.”
THE THREAD THAT is attempting to connect Nix to Gabriel and eventually to Moore is Will Stein.
Former offensive coordinator Kenny Dillingham may have been part of what brought Nix to Eugene, but after he left for the Arizona State head-coaching gig, Stein was able to seamlessly pick up where he left off and help Nix put together a Heisman-worthy season in 2023.
You don’t have to spend too much time talking to Stein to realize that he’s a football-obsessed mind. Stein is pragmatic about how to run an offense and though that doesn’t mean he isn’t flexible with his approach, it does bring about a palpable confidence to what he does. As he put it, Gabriel has bought in since Day 1, because he knows this is an opportunity to run a “pro-style offense that will translate to the next level.”
“And we’ll run an offense that has been successful at every stop I’ve been at,” Stein said.
As soon as Oregon received a commitment from Gabriel, the former co-offensive coordinator at UTSA went back and watched all of Gabriel’s previous college games to see what schemes he thrived in, which ones he didn’t and how they could fit into the offense that Stein had already established in Eugene.
“It’s hard to put a label on what we do because we kind of do a little bit of everything. … We like to look complex, but we’re really pretty simple,” Stein said, describing his offense as one that can be nimble to different personnel groupings, formations and different quarterbacks. “Going back to the Chip [Kelly] days, which is high octane, high tempo, limited formation spread. We’re really not that, like we have that ability, we do a lot of that, but when you get down to the core of what we are, we’re as pro style as anybody else.”
The one thing that is certain inside Stein’s system is this: His offense gives the quarterback plenty of freedom, but also the responsibility of getting the offense “in good plays and out of bad plays.” It’s why filling that void left behind by Nix with a player like Gabriel and planning for the future with Moore was so crucial.
“He knew how to tailor the offense around Bo,” Moore, who was initially committed to Oregon before flipping to UCLA, said of Stein. “He adjusted it. He tailored it to him. Dillon, he comes in and says he likes this, he’s going to tailor it around him. Me coming in too, he’s going to tailor the offense around you.”
Nix, Stein said, was a phenomenal processor of information, giving him the ability to handle all the pre-snap motions, scheme changes and protections. To maintain that level of competence on that side of the ball, they needed someone who could jump in and process things quickly, someone who had already seen a lot before.
“It’s like talking to that graduate-level student, you know, compared to freshman,” Stein said of a player with as much experience as Gabriel. “He’s seen a lot of defenses over his career. He has played in big moments, but there’s still a process to it. His command of the offense has to be of the utmost importance for us to function at a high level.”
Stein said that some of the initial learning may have been outside of Gabriel’s comfort zone. But his willingness to learn — through repetition and trial and error — meant that as the first game of the season approached, they had now installed the offense three separate times, and both of them felt as comfortable as they could have on such a fast timeline.
“I’ve been in the McDonald’s menu where you may have the number one, but there’s more to memorize,” Gabriel said of the different offensive approaches he’s encountered. “But then I’ve also been in the Bible verse era, they tell every single person what to do, but you’re able to be much more clear on communicating every single thing. So it’s just a mixture. Whatever gets the job done.”
Whether it’s a playcalling style that’s more intricate or one that’s simpler, Gabriel has experienced it all. In Eugene, Gabriel said, learning the offense has been complex but not unfamiliar. If anything, it’s similar concepts with different terms, and he knows that the elaborate nature of the offense is also what allows him to have more control over it.
So far, the results have been both undeniable — five wins, an average of 458 yards per game and 35 points per game — but not quite an encore of last season, where Nix and Co. averaged 531 yards and 44 points per game while boasting the eighth best red zone touchdown conversion rate in the country. This year, the Ducks are 45th in that stat.
Still, it’s hard to nitpick Gabriel’s production (1,449 yards, 11 touchdowns). Like Nix last season, Oregon’s offense has produced the most efficient quarterback in the country. Gabriel’s 77.8 completion rate tops all quarterbacks so far this season (Nix finished at 77.4 last year), even those who have nearly half the passing attempts he does.
“Dylan’s been extremely efficient,” Lanning said after Oregon’s win over UCLA. “It’s all him. He’s the one making every play. None of these coaches get to go make any of those plays.”
For all the talk about Stein’s scheme or Gabriel’s experience, even Moore’s potential, Lanning’s rhetoric during most postgames is a reminder that none of it matters without execution. Without being able to conjure up another year of eligibility for Nix, getting a quarterback who has executed at a high level for five full seasons now like Gabriel was the next best thing. And now, with Moore in the system as a sophomore and former No. 2 overall recruit, Oregon is hoping it can have a longer runway to develop a quarterback in their image.
“I think after his freshman year [Moore] realized that maybe the decision he made wasn’t what he wanted to do originally,” Stein said. “We wanted to make his original dreams to play here come true. And when you can add and improve your team at a spot that you feel is like a positional need in the future, you do it. It’s just like free agency in the NFL. We have the opportunity here to do that.”
Oregon has just handled UCLA 34-13 at the Rose Bowl and Gabriel is sitting to his left after throwing for three touchdowns — two of them caught by Johnson. Gabriel’s 10 incompletions in the game are the most he has had all season to this point. The week before against Oregon State, Gabriel started the game 15-for-15.
When Johnson, who witnessed Nix’s development into one of the best quarterbacks in the sport while in Eugene firsthand, is asked what he has seen from Gabriel so far this season to give him confidence in the Ducks’ offense going forward, he does not hesitate.
“I see confidence, poise, trusting his teammates,” Johnson said. “And when you got a quarterback like that, it’s always comfortable. … As a receiver you love that because you don’t have to really think of too much. His job is already hard as it is, so we try to make it easy for him.”
Though the scores and the win column tell one story, it hasn’t been all easy for Gabriel and Oregon. The shuffling — by design — of the offensive line early on in the year didn’t seem to put the Ducks in the best position to succeed as Gabriel was sacked seven times in the first two games.
But against Oregon State, Lanning put Iapani Laloulu at center and shuffled the rest of the line around him, sticking with the unit throughout the victory. Since the shift, Gabriel has not been sacked once in the past three games.
It took Nix a full season to reach his full potential inside Oregon’s offense. Much like Gabriel, the best version of the combination between the two parties didn’t happen right away. But if Gabriel and Oregon want to turn this season into something more than just Gabriel’s last and another close call for Lanning, any learning curve must be erased.
There has been marked improvement from Oregon’s offense from its first game to now, but with the undefeated Buckeyes and the stingiest defense in the nation looming, there will be no margin for error.
Oregon has trusted Gabriel with ushering the unit in the footsteps of one of the more productive quarterbacks the school has seen. The first five games were about getting acquainted with what the offense looks like on the field and setting the tone. The next five will determine what kind of season Oregon will have. What may seem like pressure to some is easy for Gabriel to embrace, in this environment more so than most.
“They have complete confidence in me out there and it’s empowering,” Gabriel said. “If s—‘s f—ed up, you want to make it right, you know? The freedom they give me allows us to make it right.”
ORLANDO, Fla. — Scott Frost walks into the UCF football building and into his office, the one he used the last time he had this job, eight years ago. The shades are drawn, just like they used to be. There are drawings from his three kids tacked to the walls. There are still trophies sitting on a shelf.
He still parks in the same spot before he walks into that same building and sits at the same desk. The only thing that has changed is that the desk is positioned in a different part of the room.
But the man doing all the same things at the University of Central Florida is a different Scott Frost than the one who left following that undefeated 2017 season to take the head coach job at Nebraska.
UCF might look the same, but the school is different now, too. The Knights are now in a Power 4 conference, and there is now a 12-team College Football Playoff that affords them the opportunity to play for national championships — as opposed to self-declaring them. Just outside his office, construction is underway to upgrade the football stadium. The same, but different.
“I know I’m a wiser person and smarter football coach,” Frost said during a sit-down interview with ESPN. “When you’re young, you think you have it all figured out. I don’t think you really get better as a person unless you go through really good things, and really bad things. I just know I’m where I’m supposed to be.”
Out on the practice field, Frost feels the most at home — he feels comfort in going back to the place that has defined nearly every day of his life. As a young boy, he learned the game from his mom and dad, both football coaches, then thrived as a college and NFL player before going into coaching.
He coaches up his players with a straightforwardness that quarterbacks coach McKenzie Milton remembers fondly from their previous time together at UCF. Milton started at quarterback on the 2017 undefeated team, and the two remained close after Frost left.
“I see the same version of him from when I was here as a player,” Milton said. “Even though the dynamic in college football has changed dramatically with the portal and NIL, I think Coach Frost is one of the few coaches that can still bring a group of guys together and turn them into a team, just with who he is and what he’s done and what he’s been through in his life. He knows what it looks like to succeed, both as a coach and a player.”
Since his return, Frost has had to adjust to those changes to college football, but he said, “I love coming into work every day. We’ve got the right kids who love football. We’re working them hard. They want to be pushed. They want to be challenged. We get to practice with palm trees and sunshine and, we’re playing big-time football. But it’s also just not the constant stress meat grinder of some other places.”
Meat grinder of some other places.
Might he mean a place such as Nebraska?
“You can think what you want,” Frost said. “One thing I told myself — I’m never going to talk about that. It just doesn’t feel good to talk about. I’ll get asked 100 questions. This is about UCF. I just don’t have anything to say.”
Frost says he has no regrets about leaving UCF, even though he didn’t get the results he had hoped for at his alma mater. When Nebraska decided to part ways with coach Mike Riley in 2017, Frost seemed the best, most obvious candidate to replace him. He had been the starting quarterback on the 1997 team, the last Nebraska team to win a national title.
He now had the coaching résumé to match. Frost had done the unthinkable at UCF — taking a program that was winless the season before he arrived, to undefeated and the talk of the college football world just two years later.
But he could not ignore the pull of Nebraska and the opportunities that came along with power conference football.
“I was so happy here,” Frost said. “We went undefeated and didn’t get a chance to win a championship, at least on the field. You are always striving to reach higher goals. I had always told myself I wasn’t going to leave here unless there was a place that you can legitimately go and win a national championship. It was a tough decision because I didn’t want to leave regardless of which place it was.”
Indeed, Frost maintains he was always happy at UCF. But he also knew returning to Nebraska would make others happy, too.
“I think I kind of knew that wasn’t best for me,” he said. “It was what some other people wanted me to do to some degree.”
In four-plus seasons with the Cornhuskers, Frost went 16-31 — including 5-22 in one-score games. He was fired three games into the 2022 season after a home loss to Georgia Southern.
After Frost was fired, he moved to Scottsdale, Arizona, where his wife has family. He reflected on what happened during his tenure with the Cornhuskers but also about what he wanted to do with the rest of his career. He tried to stay connected to the game, coaching in the U.S. Army Bowl, a high school all-star game in Frisco, Texas, in December 2022. Milton coached alongside him, and distinctly remembers a conversation they had.
“He said, ‘It’s my goal to get back to UCF one day,'” Milton said. “At that time, I was like, ‘I pray to God that happens.'”
If that was the ultimate goal, Frost needed to figure out how to position himself to get back there. While he contemplated his future, he coached his son’s flag football team to a championship. Frost found the 5- and 6-year-olds he coached “listen better than 19-year-olds sometimes.”
Ultimately, he decided on a career reboot in the NFL. Frost had visited the Rams during their offseason program, and when a job came open in summer 2024, Rams coach Sean McVay immediately reached out.
Frost was hired as a senior analyst, primarily helping with special teams but also working with offense and defense.
“It was more just getting another great leader in the building, someone who has been a head coach, that has wisdom and a wealth of experience to be able to learn from,” McVay told ESPN. “His ability to be able to communicate to our players from a great coaching perspective, but also have the empathy and the understanding from when he played — all of those things were really valuable.”
McVay said he and Frost had long discussions about handling the challenges that come with falling short as a head coach.
“There’s strength in the vulnerability,” McVay said. “I felt that from him. There’s a real power in the perspective that you have from those different experiences. If you can really look at some of the things that maybe didn’t go down the way you wanted to within the framework of your role and responsibility, real growth can occur. I saw that in him.”
Frost says his time with the Rams rejuvenated him.
“It brought me back,” Frost said. “Sometimes when you’re a head coach or maybe even a coordinator, you forget how fun it is to be around the game when it’s not all on you all the time. What I did was a very small part, and we certainly weren’t going to win or lose based on every move that I made, and I didn’t have to wear the losses and struggle for the victories like you do when you’re a head coach. I’m so grateful to those guys.”
UCF athletics director Terry Mohajir got a call from then-head coach Gus Malzahn last November. Malzahn, on the verge of finishing his fourth season at UCF, was contemplating becoming offensive coordinator at Florida State. Given all the responsibilities on his desk as head coach — from NIL to the transfer portal to roster management — he found the idea of going back to playcalling appealing. Mohajir started preparing a list of candidates and was told Thanksgiving night that Malzahn had planned to step down.
Though Frost previously worked at UCF under athletics director Danny White, he and Mohajir had a preexisting relationship. Mohajir said he reached out to Frost after he was fired at Nebraska to gauge his interest in returning to UCF as offensive coordinator under Malzahn. But Frost was not ready.
This time around, Mohajir learned quickly that Frost had interest in returning as head coach. Mohajir called McVay and Rams general manager Les Snead. They told him Frost did anything that was asked of him, including making copies around the office.
“They said, ‘You would never know he was the head coach at a major college program.” Mohajir also called former Nebraska athletic director Trev Alberts to get a better understanding about what happened with the Cornhuskers.
“Fits are a huge piece, and not everybody fits,” Mohajir said.
After eight conversations, Mohajir decided he wanted to meet Frost in person. They met at an airport hotel in Dallas.
“He was motivated,” Mohajir said. “We went from coast to coast, talked to coordinators, head coaches, pro guys, all kinds of different folks. And at the end of the day, I really believe that Scott wanted the job the most.”
The first day back in Orlando, Dec. 8, was a blur. Frost woke up at 3:45 a.m. in California to be able to make it to Florida in time for his introductory news conference with his family.
When they pulled into the campus, his first time back since he left in 2017, Frost said he was in a fog. It took another 24 hours for him and his wife, Ashley, to take a deep exhale.
“Rather than bouncing around chasing NFL jobs, we thought maybe we would be able to plant some roots here and have our kids be in a stable place for a while at a place that I really enjoyed coaching and that I think it has a chance to evolve into a place that could win a lot of football games,” Frost said. “All that together was just enough to get me to come back.”
The natural question now is whether Frost can do what he did during his first tenure.
That 2017 season stands as the only winning season of his head coaching career, but it carries so much weight with UCF fans because of its significance as both the best season in school history, and one that changed both its own future and college football.
After UCF finished 13-0, White self-declared the Knights national champions. Locked out of the four-team playoff after finishing No. 12 in the final CFP standings, White started lobbying for more attention to be paid to schools outside the power conferences.
That season also positioned UCF to pounce during the next wave of realignment. Sure enough, in 2023, the Knights began play in a Power 4 conference for the first time as Big 12 members. This past season, the CFP expanded to 12 teams. Unlike 2017, UCF now has a defined path to play for a national title and no longer has to go undefeated and then pray for a shot. Win the Big 12 championship, no matter the record, and UCF is in the playoff.
But Frost cautions those who expect the clock to turn back to 2017.
“I don’t think there’s many people out there that silly,” Frost said. “People joke about that with me, that they’re going to expect you go into undefeated in the first year. I think the fans are a little more realistic than that.”
The game, of course, is different. Had the transfer portal and NIL existed when Frost was at UCF during his first tenure, he might not have been able to keep the 2017 team together. The 2018 team, which went undefeated under Josh Heupel before losing to LSU in the Fiesta Bowl, might not have stayed together, either.
This upcoming season, UCF will receive a full share of television revenue from the Big 12, after receiving a half share (estimated $18 million) in each of his first two seasons. While that is more than what it received in the AAC, it is less than what other Big 12 schools received, making it harder to compete immediately. It also struggled with NIL funding. As a result, in its first two years in the conference, UCF went 5-13 in Big 12 play and 10-15 overall.
Assuming the House v. NCAA settlement goes into effect this summer, Mohajir says UCF is aiming to spend the full $20.5 million, including fully funding football.
“It’s like we moved to the fancy neighborhood, and we got a job that’s going to pay us money over time, and we’re going to do well over time, but we’re stretching a little to be there right now, and that requires a lot of effort from a lot of people and a lot of commitment from a lot of people,” Frost said. “So far, the help that we’ve gotten has been impressive.”
Mohajir points out that UCF has had five coaching changes over the past 10 years, dating back to the final season under George O’Leary in 2015, when the Knights went 0-12. Frost says he wants to be in for the long term, and Mohajir hopes consistency at head coach will be an added benefit. Mohajir believes UCF is getting the best of Frost in this moment and scoffs at any questions about whether rehiring him will work again.
“Based on what I’m seeing right now, it will absolutely work,” Mohajir said. “But I don’t really look at it as ‘working again.’ It’s not ‘again.’ It’s, ‘Will it work?’ Because it’s a different era.”
To that end, Frost says success is not recreating 2017 and going undefeated. Rather, Frost said, “If our group now can help us become competitive in the Big 12, and then, from time to time, compete for championships and make us more relevant nationally, I think we’ll have done our job to help catapult UCF again.”
You could say he is looking for the same result. He’s just taking a different route there.
Houston transfer safety A.J. Haulcy committed to LSU on Sunday, his agency, A&P Sports, told ESPN.
Haulcy, the top player still available and No. 1 safety in ESPN’s spring transfer portal rankings, committed to the Tigers after taking an official visit Sunday. Miami, Ole Miss and SMU were also contenders for his pledge.
The 6-foot, 215-pound senior defensive back has started 32 games over his three college seasons and earned first-team All-Big 12 honors in 2024 after producing 74 tackles, 8 pass breakups and 5 interceptions, which tied for most in the conference.
The Tigers also landed USF transfer Bernard Gooden, one of the most coveted defensive tackles in the spring transfer window.
Haulcy began his career at New Mexico in 2022, earning a starting role as a true freshman and recording 87 tackles, including a career-high 24 against Fresno State, and two interceptions. The Houston native entered the transfer portal at the end of the season and came home to play for the Cougars.
As a sophomore in 2023, Haulcy recorded a team-high 98 tackles and received votes for Big 12 Defensive Newcomer of the Year from the league’s coaches.
Haulcy chose to re-enter the portal April 21 after Houston’s spring game, as did starting cornerback Jeremiah Wilson, who’ll continue his career at Florida State. Wilson and Haulcy were the Nos. 11 and 12 players, respectively, in ESPN’s spring transfer rankings.
BYU picked up a pair of key transfer portal additions Saturday, as brothers Bear and Tiger Bachmeier told ESPN that they have committed to play for the Cougars next season.
The brothers are transferring from Stanford and project to be key players of the immediate and long-term plans for the BYU program.
Bear, a quarterback, committed Saturday morning at the end of his visit, he told ESPN. He is a class of 2025 recruit who committed to Stanford out of high school and enrolled there this spring.
Both Bachmeiers elected to transfer in the wake of Stanford’s dismissal of head coach Troy Taylor in March. After visiting BYU coach Kalani Sitake’s program in recent days, the brothers committed.
For Bear, he is expected to be one of the backups for successful incumbent quarterback Jake Retzlaff in 2025 and compete for the starting job at BYU in 2026.
Bear was attracted to BYU’s open offensive scheme and a rich history of quarterbacks that includes a strong recent run under offensive coordinator Aaron Roderick. He also referenced BYU’s historical success, which stretches from Jim McMahon to Ty Detmer to Steve Young.
“The ability to come in and win games and [Coach] Roderick’s scheme and the pedigree of quarterbacks they have produced in history and recently is enticing,” Bear told ESPN.
Tiger told ESPN he committed to BYU later Saturday. He’ll arrive at BYU having graduated from Stanford in two-and-a-half years with a degree in computer science. He’ll enroll in a graduate program at BYU, he said.
Tiger will be expected to be an immediate contributor at wide receiver. He caught 46 balls over two seasons at Stanford for 476 yards and two touchdowns. He has two years of eligibility remaining.
Bear and Tiger are the second and third brothers to play major college football in their family. Their older brother, Hank Bachmeier, played quarterback at Boise State, Louisiana Tech and Wake Forest, where his college career concluded last year.
There is one more Bachmeier brother remaining: Buck Bachmeier will be a freshman in high school in the fall.