NBC Sports’ Joshua Perry wonders if Dante Moore could fake an injury to protect his draft stock

Dante Moore’s Oregon season has taken a strange turn, but not so strange that you’d imagine the quarterback faking an injury to escape it.

Appearing on The Zach Gelb Show days after Oregon’s upset loss to Oklahoma State and Dan Lanning’s testy press conference about Moore’s absence from the podium, NBC’s Joshua Perry floated the idea that Moore — a projected first-round pick — might eventually pull a hamstring or a back, purely as a matter of self-preservation, if Oregon’s season keeps sliding.

If things continue to go poorly for Oregon, @mrjoshuaperry wonders if Dante Moore will fake an injury to protect his draft stock. pic.twitter.com/tW7Jr8TT2S

— Zach Gelb (@ZachGelb) September 14, 2026

“The other thing human emotion-wise, that I’m gonna project right now, not saying that he would ever do this, but like, I don’t know, do I get a hammy, do I get a little lower back injury, and if things don’t improve, just kind of like, I’m not be around for the mess,” Perry, a linebacker off Ohio State’s 2014 national championship team, said. “Because one of the things I will say is he’s still spinning it, right? Like dudes are out there dropping the ball. They’re not protecting very well. He is still spinning the rock. And I just, you might get to a point where you’re like, I’m not gonna be a part of the mess anymore.”

Gelb wondered whether NFL evaluators would actually hold something like that against Moore.

“I remember Jalen Ramsey, when he was with the Jaguars, had that back injury, and then he wound up with the Rams and he was OK,” Gelb said. “At the quarterback position though, it’s a little bit different. If he does that — oh, my hamstring’s hurting a little bit, my shoulder’s hurting a little bit — quitting on your team as a quarterback, that’s a rough look.”

And if Moore did make such a decision, Perry, who now works alongside Ahmed Fareed, Chris Simms, Nicole Auerbach, and Connor Rogers on NBC’s College Countdown, said he’d expect Moore’s representatives — in this hypothetical scenario —to frame it as protecting his future rather than quitting on Oregon.

“Yeah, well, I would, if I were his people, I would totally spin it,” Perry said. “I would do the PR. He didn’t quit on the team. The team quit on him before, and he didn’t want to be a part of that anymore. It’s a business he’s protecting, his investment to himself. You could hold it against him — it’s not the most quarterback-y thing to do… If I had $50 million riding on what was going on, and I felt like the best strategy was to just pull the ripcord and not be a part of an offense that wasn’t gonna let me thrive the way that I need to, it’s business at that point.”

Perry wasn’t actually advocating for Moore to fake an injury, to be clear — he said as much twice in the same breath, first prefacing the whole scenario with “not saying that he would ever do this,” then later insisting he was just “projecting” a hypothetical rather than making a genuine forecast. But it’s still jarring to say out loud about a guy whose worst outing this season is a rough 191-yard, two-touchdown game in a loss to Oklahoma State.

Moore is a redshirt junior who already turned down a projected first-round selection once to come back to Oregon for exactly this reason. Through two games, he’s thrown for 569 yards and five touchdowns with zero interceptions—hardly the stat line of a quarterback whose draft stock is in danger, at least not yet. If protecting that stock were really the priority, the decision not to return to Eugene would have been sitting right there in January.