Adam RittenbergDec 16, 2025, 07:00 AM ETCloseCollege football reporter; joined ESPN in 2008. Graduate of Northwestern University.Follow on X
Who does Field Yates like for the top pick in the NFL draft? (1:02)Field Yates examines the top-pick candidacies of Fernando Mendoza and Dante Moore. (1:02)
EUGENE, Ore. — When wide receiver Malik Benson transferred to Oregon in January, Dante Moore, the team’s projected starter at quarterback, drove him around town.
“I’m like, ‘Man, this is the music my mom would listen to when we had to get up and clean the house,'” Benson said. “It was early 2000s R&B. He’s an old head, for sure.”
Much of Moore’s soundtrack stretches back well beyond his birth date. He’ll play everything from Al Green to The O’Jays to New Edition to Lauryn Hill.
Dante Moore, who started college at 17 and turned 20 in May, doesn’t dispute the designation. He had to grow up fast for different reasons, including being one of the best quarterbacks in the country before he entered high school. Maturity came easier to him than most.
Moore spent most of last season watching, waiting and learning. For decades, transfers were forced to sit out a year, but since those rules changed several years ago, it hardly ever happens. The allure of immediate playing time has top players, especially quarterbacks, hopscotching the country in search of a starting job.
So why did Moore, the nation’s No. 2 overall recruit, who had always started and immediately became a starter at UCLA, take the throwback route?
“I could have gone to multiple places, any place in the country, to be honest,” said Moore, who will lead Oregon against No. 12 seed James Madison on Saturday night in a first-round College Football Playoff game. “I just felt like I needed to sit back and get myself together.”
He started out as an unlikely Duck. Moore grew up in Detroit, with parents on either side of the Michigan-Ohio State rivalry. Otha is a Detroit native and still has an allegiance to Michigan; Moore’s mother, Jera Bohlen-Moore, is an Ohioan, from a family of Buckeyes.
“Our relationship was amazing,” Moore said. “He’d come out [to Detroit] a lot. We used to go on walks. I would show him around. I remember our Christmas lighting, everybody kept posting us being at the Christmas tree. We were always kicking it with each other.”
Moore also had a strong connection to Ducks offensive coordinator Kenny Dillingham. But in late November 2022, Dillingham landed the head coaching job at Arizona State, his alma mater. Oregon acted quickly in finding a replacement and hired Will Stein from UTSA.
Stein was a promising young playcaller but had never held an on-field role for a power-conference school.
“It was something that we had our heart stuck on from the beginning,” Otha Moore said. “And that last-minute coaching change kind of threw a wrench in the fan and we kind of jumped to conclusions a little bit fast.”
Other teams remained in pursuit of Moore, a top-3 recruit in the 2022 class. Among them: UCLA, which was coached by Chip Kelly, the offensive guru who had molded top quarterbacks and whose scheme and philosophy first gained national attention at, of all places, Oregon. UCLA also offered an immediate path to a starting job.
“It was Chip Kelly vs. Will Stein,” Stein explained. “My name now probably carries a little bit more weight in the quarterback world than it did then.”
Moore signed with UCLA several days later. Lanning had seen communication wane leading up to signing day, and Moore had visited UCLA’s campus.
His decision didn’t come as a surprise. Lanning shot Moore a text: “Love you, man. Wish you nothing but the best.”
“I was pretty disappointed,” Lanning said. “You want to make sure you handle those relationships the right way, but in our mind, it wasn’t necessarily thinking, ‘Hey, we’re going to get another opportunity to coach this guy down the road.'”
OTHA MOORE RAISED Dante and his two older children mostly as a single dad. He worked as an engineer for Ford, but also held other jobs, including a landscaping business.
Dante has helped Otha since he was around 10 years old. One time, he didn’t know how to dump the debris bag on the mower without assistance. So he took the bag off and kept cutting.
“My dad’s like, ‘What are you doing? Figure it out. I’m not going to help you,'” Dante said. “So I’m sitting there, like, trying to put this bag into the thing. He showed me, with situations in life, sometimes you’ve got to find a way on your own.”
Things started off well for Moore on the field. He became UCLA’s starter by Week 2 and threw seven touchdown passes in his first three college games. But then he opened Pac-12 play against three consecutive top-15 opponents and completed just 51 of 112 pass attempts with six interceptions. He was benched after a Week 7 loss to Oregon State, and while he saw extensive action in the regular-season finale against Cal, he threw two interceptions in a 33-7 loss.
“A lot of hype, true freshman going in, hasn’t been since … a long time,” Moore said. “My first couple games are going amazing and then you hit that block. It’s like, ‘I’m not playing for the city of Detroit anymore. I’m playing for people that are UCLA fans across the whole world,’ so you get so much hate and trauma put onto you.”
“There’s a clear difference between UCLA and Oregon, at that point,” Stein said. “Everybody could see that.”
Moore prepared to enter the transfer portal. He huddled with his family and his agent, Brandon Grier, and assessed the landscape. They wanted a place where Moore would grow and also have the right players protecting him up front, catching his passes and sharing the backfield.
“Dante had aged in a way. When he was a freshman at UCLA, he could have still been a senior in high school,” Grier said. “That really allowed him to take a step back and look at [2024] as a reset year. Where he may have been rushing to be the guy, he wanted to step back and look at it from a big-picture standpoint.”
Moore soon focused on Oregon as his transfer destination. He already knew the coaches and would have the talent around him to guide his development.
But on Dec. 9, 2023, Gabriel, who had four 3,000-yard passing seasons as a starter at Oklahoma and UCF, and more than 14,000 passing yards at the FBS level, announced he would play his sixth and final season at Oregon. Gabriel would follow Bo Nix, another veteran transfer who became a record-setting quarterback for the Ducks.
“We got Dillon, and he was going to be our locked-in starter,” Stein said. “But then when Dante called and said, ‘Hey, I’m really interested in coming back and willing to sit and learn, just have a growth year,’ we took it and said: ‘How can we turn this opportunity down?'”
“The goal, at first, from high school, was he’ll learn from Bo Nix [at Oregon],” said Ty Spencer, who coached Moore at King High School in Detroit. “But it was just kind of the opposite. He tried it at UCLA, and he understood, ‘Hey, I’ve got a lot more to learn than I think, and I’m OK with humbling myself.'”
“From the time we first met them, from Will to Dan, they’ve never changed,” Otha Moore said. “They’ve been the same guys.”
Lanning sensed that the year at UCLA had weighed on Moore. Los Angeles is a media and entertainment hub and Moore, because of his recruiting accolades, found himself in the spotlight. At Oregon, he would share a quarterback room with an older, more accomplished player in Gabriel.
“It’s a little bit off the beaten path,” Lanning said. “It’s not necessarily right in the center of L.A. or New York or Houston. For the guys looking to sit courtside and be at a concert every night, this isn’t the place for them. But for a guy looking to focus, grow as a player and a person, this is the right place.”
The setting might have been ideal, but the role was unfamiliar. Moore had been a starting quarterback ever since he was 9, when he requested to play up on a youth team of 13-year-olds called the Southfield Falcons. Otha had told Dante that he wouldn’t play right away, and Dante was good with that. Although he ended up becoming a starter that season for the Southfield Falcons after an injury, Oregon would be different.
“It made me really want to come here even more, knowing that he was coming,” Moore said. “I would get to learn, see how a vet quarterback moves and takes control of the offense. And I got to see him every day.”
“We never saw moments of disinterest or mind wandering in different spots,” Stein said. “Only one guy’s playing, so some [backups] kind of wait to prep like your starter until, ‘Oh my gosh, I might be it.’ He always [prepared].”
Moore’s “elite football IQ,” Stein said, showed up in him suggesting schematic concepts, different checks, protections or route stems that most underclassmen aren’t relaying. Moore didn’t shy away from asking challenging questions or showing leadership, even as QB2.
Oregon surged to an undefeated regular season and a Big Ten championship, and Gabriel became a Heisman finalist while recording career highs in passing yards (3,857), passing touchdowns (30) and completion percentage (72.9). During games, Moore would conduct pre-snap reads and play the game out in his mind.
“There were many times I wanted to go out there and throw touchdown passes and things like that,” Moore said. “But it wasn’t my time yet.”
AS OREGON’S 2025 season opener against Montana State approached, Moore felt the nerves. He had not started for 687 days.
But he also trusted those around him at Oregon and what he had learned in the previous year and a half.
A month into the season, he stood on the field at earsplitting Beaver Stadium, with No. 6 Oregon trailing No. 3 Penn State by a touchdown in overtime. Oregon faced fourth-and-1 from the Penn State 5-yard line, and Moore, not known for his mobility, converted on a designed quarterback draw. He found Jamari Johnson for the tying score moments later, then opened the second overtime with a 25-yard touchdown pass to Gary Bryant Jr. as Oregon went on to win 30-24.