Another year, another season without a national championship for the Oregon Ducks. Entering the College Football Playoff, the Big Ten champions earned the No. 1 seed as the lone undefeated team left in college football. While I grew to love their overall steadiness, I had great concerns about how they would respond to adversity. They played some great teams this year, but were rarely pushed.

As I was making my way back from a fantastic Peach Bowl between Arizona State and Texas, I looked down at my phone in my Lyft and was shocked to see Ohio State manhandling the Ducks through the first frame. Oregon played better to some degree as the game went along, but I fell for the same Lucy pulling the football out from Charlie Brown nonsense. This is who Oregon really is: Still soft in the end.

While I hope that Dan Lanning grows from his first playoff game as a head coach, this is the end of the line for sixth-year senior quarterback Dillon Gabriel. He had been in college football forever, playing in metroplexes known for only having one major professional sports team (Orlando, Oklahoma City, Portland). I had a bad feeling his size and lack of athleticism would ruin Oregon in the end. It sure did.

Now that his college career is done, I wonder what NFL team is going to take a flier on him in day two…

I forget where my FanSided.com colleague and False Start co-host Cody Williams got this from, but he mentioned to me way back in September that Gabriel only really likes to throw the ball to his left. Once you see it, you can never unsee it. Gabriel was a great player for Oregon, an excellent player at Oklahoma and a fun player at UCF, but he was never going to be a franchise quarterback in the NFL.

Oh, he will make an NFL roster. He will probably win a starting job at some point in his career. If he goes to the right team, then maybe he can become a Pro Bowl quarterback and lead a team to the playoffs for a few years. However, I just always felt that there was a ceiling with him as a college football quarterback. Look no further than how his better-athlete predecessor is doing in Denver.

As I was watching the Rose Bowl unravel before my very eyes, I kept thinking that Gabriel’s counterpart in Ohio State’s Will Howard played like a lesser version of Bo Nix, the quarterback who would have won Oregon is first national title in my lifetime, probably ever. Gabriel looked small trying to move around in a collapsing pocket because of Ohio State’s pass rush. What about the NFL next?

Gabriel can move a little and throws a beautiful left-handed spiral. Unfortunately, his size and injury history were always going to hold him back during the draft process. If he was having this much of a hard time vs. the Ohio State defense after having played them before and on a month’s worth of preparation, how do you think he is going to fare against a pass rush like the Pittsburgh Steelers’?

I do not like crushing the guy, but I feel validated in knowing that his finite ceiling has been fully hit.