A month after losing their offensive coordinator, it appears that the Oregon Ducks football program has found a replacement.
Dec. 11, coordinator Marcus Arroyo officially left Oregon to take the head job at UNLV. Exactly 23 days later, Joe Moorhead was fired as the head coach at Mississippi State.
Those two events are coming to a confluence as it’s being reported by college football insider Brett McMurphy that Moorhead will replace Arroyo on the Oregon Ducks football staff. It’s unclear if, like Arroyo, Moorhead will coach quarterbacks as well.
Former Mississippi State coach Joe Moorhead expected to be new offensive coordinator at Oregon, source told @Stadium. Moorhead was OC at Penn State from 2016-17
— Brett McMurphy (@Brett_McMurphy) January 15, 2020
In two seasons at Mississippi State, Moorhead went 14-12. Moorhead’s firing was centered on an ugly fight between teammates in the run-up to the Music City Bowl.
The day after Christmas, it was reported that freshman Garrett Shrader, who was supposed to start the bowl game at quarterback, was injured in a post-practice scuffle with a defensive teammate. The altercation was preceded by an in-practice altercation during a contact drill. Shrader suffered some orbital bone damage as a result of the incident.
The MSU job was, at the time, the furthest west Moorhead had worked in a three-decade coaching career.
From 2016-17, Moorhead was the coordinator and quarterbacks coach at Penn State. In the four years before that, he was the head coach at FCS Fordham. He’s also been on staffs at UConn (2009-11), Akron (2004-2008) and Georgetown (2003).
Moorhead was the coordinator at all three of those latter stops.
