COLUMBUS, Ohio — Dillon Gabriel has yet to play a single snap in the Big Ten and neither has his team. Yet he’s already considered the conference’s best player.
The sixth-year quarterback enters his final college football season on his third team, after previously transferring from Central Florida to Oklahoma.
He now looks to lead an Oregon Ducks program that enters a third year under Dan Lanning as a challenger to Michigan and Ohio State for Big Ten supremacy.
Gabriel will do so after being voted as the preseason favorite to win Big Ten Offensive Player of the Year, according to cleveland.com’s 14th annual Preseason Big Ten Football Poll. He won with an overwhelming vote total, earning 22 of the 27 first-place votes and an overall win margin of 53 points.
Gabriel spent the first two years of his career at UCF throwing for 8,037 yards and 70 touchdowns. But it’s at Oklahoma where he became a borderline Heisman Trophy candidate while helping …