The Highest Rated Recruit In Oregon History

Everyone remembers their first.

When I was nine years old, my father pinned up a picture of a sweaty, muscular eighteen year old on the wall in our home.

It was early 2005, Lehman Brothers was still living large, and so was the entire Oregon fanbase, because we had just landed a five-star running back out of Lacey, Washington, named Jonathan Stewart.

Top-ranked running back in his class, number one player in the state of Washington, and the tenth-ranked player in the nation. He’d turned down offers from USC, Ohio State, and Tennessee.

It’s hard to fathom nowadays, but back then people believed two basic things: 1) Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith could save the prequel franchise, and 2) Oregon would never recruit with the big boys.

So when J-Stew decided to come to Eugene, my dad (and every other fan on eDuck) knew just how significant it was.

It was such a big deal that he printed out that picture above, stuck it on the cork board in our home office, and proceeded to teach my brother and I his apparent nickname: “Snoop.”

Mind you, nobody ever ended up actually calling him “Snoop” during his time at Oregon—a small early lesson in expectation versus reality when it comes to commits/recruits—but this was my recruit awakening. It was the first time I remember thinking about a player that wasn’t even wearing a Duck uniform yet.

Stewart is still the fifth highest-rated recruit in Duck history, and we’ve since witnessed KT (second all-time), Noah Sewell (sixth), and DAT (eighth), all choose Oregon over any other school in the country.

Oh, and number nine on that list, Josh Conerly, is going to be an All American this season (he’s also from the state of Washington, by the way).

Of course, I’m writing all this because Dan Lanning and Junior Adams just secured a commitment from Dakorien Moore, a wide receiver out of Duncanville, Texas, who picked the Ducks after turning down LSU and Texas. As of today, Moore is now officially the highest-rated recruit in program history.

Lanning just can’t help himself, man. Enough will never be enough. He wants it all.

But—and I sound like a broken record/Debby Downer when I say this but—in the transfer portal era, you never really know how any top recruit will actually turn out.

We’ve all been burned by a recruit we thought was going to be game-changing and just… wasn’t.

I’m looking at you, Blake Cantu.

And a quick look at a few of the other dudes on that “highest-rated recruits of all time” list show a few names that didn’t quite become Jonathan Stewart:

Justin Flowe, Canton Kaumatule, Thomas Tyner, Lache Seastrunk, Kingsley Suamataia, and Ty Thompson.

Some of those guys showed flashes at Oregon, some of them found a little more success elsewhere, but basically they just became different versions of “oh yeah, that guy,” to all of us Duck fans.

All that to say: I so badly want for recruiting success to turn into on-field success (duh), and I sure hope that Dakorien Moore has a career that is much closer to J-Stew than J-Flowe, but I’ll save my printer ink and cork board space until after he catches a zillion touchdowns from Dante.

Go Ducks.