All offseason I talked about how Oregon would be very tough to beat if we got B+ play out of our QBs. On Saturday, we got D- play, and we should have lost that game. If this QB play continues, we'll be lucky to go .500 the rest of the season. And I say "QB play" because we will not see Roper for a few weeks. And I don't see this as a bad thing for 3 reasons:
1) In the Purdue game, he was awful on the spread option. His decision making was flat out terrible. When Jeremiah Johnson was in, the Purdue defense was keying on him, hard. Roper had multiple opportunities to tuck and run, and did not, and Purdue did not respect the play.
2) Ken Woody talked about this in his game recap, but Roper did not have a good pocket presence. He had a tendency to run out of the pocket rather than stepping up. And he cannot throw on the run. He loses whatever arm strength he had, and is not accurate.
3) He cannot throw the ball deep. Jaison Williams (who in my opinion is getting too much blame thus far) had one-on-one coverage on the outside most of the day, but we were never able to take advantage of that, because either Roper cannot throw deep, or the coaches will not let him throw deep. This flaw has been apparent since the UCLA game last year. He has consistenly had low yards per attempt, and the only reason that has gone over 6 in any game is because receivers have taken short passes and made more out of them.
These three flaws were serious problems in the Purdue game. They can be corrected, especially with the rocket that Masoli has, but who knows if he was the decision making/consistency that is necessary to run the offense well.
Honestly, I'm excited to see what Masoli/Harper can do. They have the talent to make this offense succeed, and will be playing (at least for the next 2 weeks) against very beatable teams.
So, I'm optimistic for the next few games. There is talent at the QB position, and we'll see how it grows over the next few weeks.