Oregon Ducks Breakout Player #7 – Jackson Powers-Johnson

OK, I get it. Putting an offensive lineman on this list is either the most obvious choice — or the biggest risk — since reports from camp seem to indicate that a version of the six rotational players from last season is still expected.

But one or two players are going to work their way into playing time. And while there are plenty of candidates, from Jonathan Denis and Dawson Jaramillo to Kingsley Suamataia or Marcus Harper.

However, there’s one guy to me that seems most likely to find his way into an impactful role and that is true freshman Jackson Powers-Johnson. His name comes up too often to not mean something. It comes from the mouths of his coaches, which is nice; but it’s the way his teammates have talked about him that leads me to believe he’s the real deal. And after Oregon’s very up-and-down play along the line in 2020, they need “real deal dudes.”

And Powers-Johnson, a babyface on the surface, is just that.

He’s a Dude.

“As a young buck, you know, I want to challenge the older guys for sure because now, I don’t think about like, ‘Oh, I might lose.’ I’m learning from it. You know, (Brandon) Dorlus and Popo (Aumavae), I want to go against them as much as possible because they’re going to get me better, or they’re going to give me a taste of what college football’s like,” Powers-Johnson recently said. “I want to do certain things to accomplish and to help this team. got to go against that really good talent. There’s no one really that I hate going against. I love the opportunity to go against anybody. It’s just another opportunity to get better as a football player.”

Powers-Johnson wasn’t the most heralded lineman in Oregon’s 2021 class. That belonged to a friend and fellow Utah native Suamataia. But no player embodied what Mario Cristobal and staff look for in a recruit more than Jackson, who, along with Oregonian Keith Brown, took the reins as the unofficial peer-recruiters of the class.

And as his reputation amongst teammates took shape, so, too did his play on the field, eventually making him one of the top centers in the country. With no spot on the offensive line locked up entering 2021, it’s not inconceivable to think of Powers-Johnson, a powerhouse at 6’-4″ and 305 pounds, playing meaningful snaps during the season.

The guy who should be most nervous about Powers-Johnson and the quickness at which he’s picking up the offense is the one directly in front of him on the center depth chart. But Alex Forsyth loves what he sees from Jackson and the rest of the young core poised to take Oregon into their next phase.

“This is a group that wants to grind,” Forsyth, a redshirt junior, recently said. “We’ve had some tough practices we’ve grinded through and excelled. We’re just trying to keep up that mentality. … This group is hungry.”

They’re hungry, Powers-Johnson is hungry, and they’re immensely talented. All that makes the perfect cocktail for playing time, and probably sooner than anyone expected.

Whether it’s Jackson or another member of either the 2020 or 2021 recruiting class, it’s clear that Oregon’s young offensive line talent is too good to keep on the bench.

Starting Saturday, we’ll begin to see just how quickly that happens.