Getting to know the 2014 Oregon Ducks: Tanner Carew

[The Ducks begin summer workouts this weekend as the incoming freshman join their brothers on campus, beginning their four and five-year adventure as college football players. As we have done annually DSH will profile the new players. The order is alphabetical.]

Tanner Crew does everything with speed and efficiency. He can snap the ball to the punter in a tight spiral in less than .75 seconds, and he can assemble a Rubik’s Cube in 27 seconds.

Chris Rubio, the nation’s long-snapping guru and the founder of recruiting’s premier long-snapping camp, calls him the best long snapper in the nation. He told Eric Sondheimer of the L.A. Times, “I would say Tanner is definitely quirky,”He’s laid back. The first time I met him, he was telling me how he wanted to ride a wake board from Long Beach to Catalina. And I said, ‘No, there’s sharks out there.’ Then we start talking about Rubik’s Cube and how he can do that. I said, ‘I don’t believe you.’ Then he did it, and I said, ‘That’s amazing.'”

In the last two seasons the Ducks graduated two phenomenally reliable snappers in Jeff Palmer and Drew Howell, so Carew comes along at just the right time. He’s 6-2, 215, a starter at linebacker and tight end in high school at Damien High in LaVerne, California. That’s important, because once in a while snappers have to make a tackle, and on every snap, they have to protect themselves.

Like Royce Freeman and Thomas Tyner, Carew was an Army All-American. He’s a solid student with a 3.2 grade average, a well-rounded athlete who runs the 40 in 4.74, benches 275, squats 415.

Snappers are rarely noticed unless something goes wrong. Rubio told Tyson Alger of the Oregonian, “This should be the last article written about him until he graduates. No one should know his name and that’s exactly how he wants it to be until he graduates and goes pro.”

As for Tanner, he called his Oregon scholarship “the opportunity of a lifetime.”

“Oregon was my number one choice in the beginning. I couldn’t be more excited, ” he said to Aram Tolegian of the San Gabriel Valley Tribune.