Dillon Gabriel came to the Ducks from Oklahoma and UCF and won a Big Ten Championship, a Heisman finalist who set NCAA career records for touchdowns and starts, feats that beg the January question, where does he rank in the pantheon of Oregon quarterbacks?
It’s a Valhalla of sorts, an evergreen bar argument of heroic and epic proportions, looking back at the long history of the great, near great and briefly great that have taken snaps for the Northwest’s Greatest Show on Turf, the kind of mental arm wrestling that can get heated after a few beers.
The difficulty begins in assigning the labels without defined terms: What gets more weight? Wins? Impact on the program? Stats? What the player did, or what he could have done with more talent around him or an injury-free season? It gets sticky when the conversation comes around to Dennis Dixon or Vernon Adams, two QBs who achieved one brief shining moment but didn’t get an even break from the gods of football destiny and the x-ray machine…