As the Oregon Ducks chase a national title, interior wrecking ball A’Mauri Washington is collapsing pockets and devouring double teams to solidify his reputation as a premier defensive powerhouse.
The Oregon Ducks have the speed and the agility to win a College Football Playoff national championship this season.
The Ducks are loaded with skilled talent in the backfield, at receiver and in the secondary.
What Oregon must show this season is improvement in physicality. Indiana, who won the national championship in January after beating the Ducks twice last season, proved to be the most physical team in college football.
The Hoosiers defeated Miami in the CFP national title game, and the Hurricanes made to the championship by building their physicality in the trenches.
The Ducks have one player on the defense line that is getting national attention before the upcoming season. Brad Crawford of CBS Sports ranked defensive lineman A'Mauri Washington as the No. 5 most feared defender in college football.
"One of several returning senior starters for the Ducks at the line of scrimmage, Washington collected 33 stops as a third-year sophomore with seven passes defended," Crawford wrote. "Few interior defenders are as disruptive snap-for-snap, and Washington consistently collapses the pocket from the interior, a devastating development for quarterbacks trying to step up against the Ducks' edge pressure.
"Washington's value goes beyond the numbers, too. He eats double teams, clogs rushing lanes and creates cleaner opportunities for linebackers behind him -- all of them veterans and uber-talented as well."
Washington recorded 33 tackles and 1.5 sacks for Oregon last season.
Oregon head coach Dan Lanning says Washington has been working to improve his competitive motor. Washington can flash in the pan, but he needs to become a more consistent player.
“It starts with size and explosive power. I think this guy's extremely explosive,” Lanning said, via Sports Illustrated. “I think what he had to work on as he got here was his competitive stamina, the ability to go harder for longer.”
“And those moments, I think he recognized earlier, ‘Okay, it's gonna be a limiting factor. This is one of my strengths. This is a limiting factor.’ And then his ability to learn our system and be extremely disruptive, be where he's supposed to be at."
The six-foot-three, 330-pound defensive lineman could work his way up the draft board for 2027 if he becomes an elite enforcer on the defense this season.