Oregon Football Recruiting: Ducks Add Local Kicker with Rock-Solid Game Tape

The 15th commitment in Oregon's 2025 class is Sheldon kicker Rocco Graziano, who plays his high school games a couple of miles from Autzen Stadium.

The Ducks offered Graziano at Saturday Night Live on July 28th, and it only took the Eugene native a couple of weeks to think it over.

He's 6-2, 200 pounds, unrated by the major services but a 5-star according to kicking guru Chris Sailer, a kicking camp and specialist coach who tends to be ultra generous with his ratings.

Even so, Graziano appears to be the real deal as a place kicker. Last year with the Irish he connected on 8-9 field goal attempts, drilling one of those from 46 yards and another from 42 yards. He was a perfect 36-36 on PATs, while 82% of his kickoffs resulted in touchbacks.

That's a big leg in anybody's league, but the crucial thing with kickers is how they'll respond to the added pressure of big crowds and national attention. Graziano seems pretty solid in his fundamentals and routine, which should help him in the adjustment.

Last week after practice Oregon special teams coach Joe Lorig met the media and talked about the need to create pressure and simulate competition in practice.

Lorig told reporters, "You just look at the numbers, to be honest with you. And then you got to put them in pressure situation because some guys can be really good at it in practice when no one's there. And it's not the same with the fans and the distractions and all the things that come along with it. So you try to replicate that as much as you can as well."

"You just try to by putting him them situations. End of practice the whole team runs if you miss this field goal kind of stuff. We're gonna have a kick off competition. You guys pick that guy ,you pick that guy, the losers have 10 up-downs you know, you just try to replicate the pressure. But you can't replicate Autzen Stadium and being on TV and all that stuff. It's a different kind of mental toughness. That's probably the hardest thing to evaluate."

Of course the last time the Ducks dipped into Sheldon High School, they wound up with Justin Herbert. That scholarship worked out pretty well. In 2014 they added a walk-on kicker from Grant High School in Portland, Oregon named Aiden Schneider.

Schneider won the job in fall camp and wound up kicking for the Ducks for four seasons. Hit hit 85% of his field goals over his career, 92% in 2014, the year the Ducks made the College Football Playoff and Marcus Mariota won the Heisman Trophy.

So for Rocco, the standard is set: Just duplicate Aiden Schneider and Justin Herbert, and you'll get a picture in the Hatfield-Dowlin Trophy room, maybe even a Groza Award in the case. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. First he has to save a bunch of his teammates from up-downs.