Dante Moore Analysis

Zach Smith · 2026-08-31T23:49:03+00:00

Indiana Got Him Twice The two worst games Dante Moore played in 2025 came against the same defense, three months apart. Everything in between says he has the best arm in college football and can't be trusted with a five-yard out. By Zach Smith Week seven, in Eugene, Dante Moore graded a 47.8. Worst game of his season. The playoff rematch: a 47.3. Those are the two lowest offensive grades he posted all year and they came against Indiana, twelve weeks apart. Nobody else on his schedule got him under 61. Indiana got him under 48 twice. I didn't catch that watching the film. I caught it pulling the season file, and once you see it you can't unsee it, because it turns a bad night into a pattern. Eleven seconds That's how long the playoff game took to go sideways. First play. Condensed splits, speed out, and Moore misses it on the receiver's inside hip. On a speed out you miss outside. Always. Inside is where the pick six lives, and D'Angelo Ponds jumped it and took it to the house. Eleven seconds in, 7-0. By halftime it was 42-7. I'll give him this. After the pick six he didn't fold. He took the medicine and kept firing. That matters to me. The arm is what I said it was Twenty-plus yards downfield: 55 attempts, 962 yards, fifteen touchdowns, two interceptions, a 98.5 grade. Twenty-five of those fifty-five were big-time throws. A 41.7% rate. He averaged 17.5 yards an attempt on deep balls with an average target depth of 28.8. Fifteen of his thirty touchdowns came twenty-plus yards downfield. Half his scoring off the hardest throw in football. Across the year, thirty big-time throws at a 6.9% clip, higher than Sayin at 5.7% and Mensah at 5.2%. A 90.7 grade on intermediate throws too. From ten yards out to the end line he's as good as anybody I studied. The mechanical reason is teachable and he already owns it. Watch his left hand. It comes up, stops dead, stays closed, and gives his body a wall to rotate against. That's the whip. Best example is a third and twelve in the first half. Indiana rotates into a trap-triangle look and drops a safety as a half-field player. Moore fakes the out, comes back to the bender, drops a dot for a touchdown. That ball has to be on time and it has to be firm, because the defender is trying to play two routes at once. There's also a 25-yard throw on the run, to his right, off his back foot with all his momentum going away from the target, and he still drives it in there. You can't coach that into somebody. And he can't complete a layup Zero to nine yards: 148 attempts, a 65.5 grade, and five interceptions. Worst area on his sheet, and more picks than every other depth combined. Another 22.6% of his throws came behind the line. Which is exactly what the film shows. The pick six that started the playoff game was a speed out. The turnover-worthy stuff on that tape isn't him trying to thread a seam forty yards downfield. It's RPOs, screens and quick game. There's a seam throw late where a low hole player is sitting underneath and Moore puts it inside, right at the kid who can pick it. Back shoulder it. Throw it away from the hole player. It's not hard. There's a check down he over-guns into the dirt. And he had eight balls batted at the line on the season, most of anybody in this series, because he drops his arm angle sidearm on throws that don't require it. He can do the extraordinary. He can't yet be trusted with the ordinary. What happens when the pocket goes Kept clean: a 93.4 grade, 75.0% completions, twenty-seven touchdowns, and a 2.25-second release. Fastest clean release I charted all offseason. Under pressure: a 47.2. 57.5% completions, three touchdowns to three picks, 3.45 seconds to throw, eighteen sacks. He holds it more than a full second longer when it breaks. That's the one-two-three-hitch-hitch-hitch problem I flagged on the tape, and the clearest version is the snap where he's got a flat-footed safety and a one-on-one outside. That's the look you wait all game for. Launch it. Worst case it falls incomplete and we punt. He holds it, the protection caves, and he eats a sack. He does use his legs. Twenty-two scrambles, double Sayin's eleven. So it isn't that he won't move. It's that he won't decide. And one split separates him from everybody, in the wrong direction. Moore graded a 90.3 when he wasn't blitzed and an 80.2 when he was. Sayin and Mensah were both fine or better against extra rushers. Moore is worse. That's a recognition problem, and it's the entire explanation for a pick six thrown on a screen into a blitz. See it. You cannot throw a screen into pressure. The whole year was a rollercoaster His season grade is a 90.2, and that's a good year. 71.6%, 3,550 yards, thirty touchdowns, 8.6 a throw, 166 first downs. It's higher than Mensah's 84.1. But nobody in this class swings like this. A 93.6 at Rutgers, fifteen of twenty for 288 and four touchdowns at 14.4 a throw. A 91.0 against Oregon State. A 90.7 at Washington. And then a 47.8, a 47.3, a 61.1 in the bowl against Texas Tech with no touchdowns, a 65.6 at Iowa, a 69.6 against Wisconsin. He didn't get much help either. Eighteen drops charged to his receivers at 5.8%, three times Sayin's number, and his adjusted completion was 80.3% against a raw 71.6%. The playoff, and two things nobody will notice Twenty-four of forty, 60.0%, 285 yards, two touchdowns, one pick, a 47.3 grade, a 28.3 fumbling grade. Four sacks on eighteen pressured dropbacks. The scoreboard will tell you he had a catastrophe. Oregon's defense had the catastrophe. 42-7 is not a quarterback's number. But he gave Indiana points himself, and I count three giveaways that belong to him in some measure: the opening pick six, a fumble when his running back's path knocked the ball out of his hand on an RPO, and a sack he created by holding it. Now the two things that don't show up anywhere. Early on, Indiana slides pressure to his lock side after his leg kick, meaning he can't flip the protection. He knows instantly he's hot and delivers a strike to his drag route. Identification and execution under duress in the same half second. Second, watch his ball placement on check downs. Defender closing from one side and he deliberately puts it on the far shoulder to protect his back. That's a kid who's been coached and who's thinking about his teammates while the play is live. He also has to trust his guys. There are multiple snaps down by a mountain of points with nothing to lose where he's got the matchup he wants and checks it down anyway. Take the shot. What are you saving it for? Around him Indiana beat the hell out of that Oregon line for four quarters and they were shuffling tackles by the end. The receivers were underwhelming, which is hard to say about that room. Dakorien Moore stopped running on a perfect deep ball that hits him in stride if he keeps his feet going. Later Moore drops a beautiful hole shot to the field and the kid turns down the catch instead of reaching out and framing it. Two touchdowns his quarterback earned and didn't get. Jamari Johnson is going to be a stud in the league and Jeremiah McClellan is the one in that room I really like, but that night they weren't good enough. The RPO fumble is as much a coaching failure as anything. Teach him to step back with the right foot before he throws and fix the back's path. That's Will Stein. And a post-wheel dies because the route is run wrong. The receiver has to work through the safety's inside hand to force the pass-off before he gets width. Drew Mehringer knows that. Where I land A B. The playoff film is a B minus and the arm talent drags it up. That tape isn't much better than Josh Hoover's. The difference is Moore's arm is on a different planet. He's ahead of Hoover, he has more raw talent than CJ Carr, and Carr's film is cleaner and I trust Carr more today. The season grade complicates my own take and I'll own that. A 90.2 is better than Mensah's 84.1 and it isn't far off Sayin's 92.9. Strictly by the number, Moore had a better year than the guy I called the best quarterback in college football. But that's the argument. I value consistent performance over talent. The league values talent over production. Dante Moore is going to get drooled over on draft weekend no matter what, and watching that playoff film, I'm not taking him in the first round. The other half is just as true. Fix the clock, keep the weight back, clean up the arm angles, and see a blitz coming. Do that and he goes nuclear and he's the first pick. There is not a throw in this sport he can't make. He's a mediocre season or a monster one, and the gap between them is coaching.