If there’s one thing you are never going to hear come out of Dan Lanning’s mouth, it’s an excuse.
When the Oregon Ducks went to Atlanta on Sept. 3 and lost to the defending-champion Georgia Bulldogs, 49-3, no excuses were given. Lanning wore it on the chin.
“Obviously that result, it starts with me,” Lanning said following the embarrassing start to the season.
It didn’t matter that Georgia was the far superior team and one that out-matched Oregon’s talent at virtually every position. It didn’t matter that the Ducks were coming into the game with a first-year head coach, an entirely new coaching staff, a mostly new roster, and a lot of sky-high expectations that weren’t based in reality.
All you heard was the Oregon coach taking the blame for the defeat.
Lanning and the Ducks aren’t ever going to make an excuse or place an asterisk on a loss. I’ll do it for them.
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When I think about who this Oregon team is, and who it can be, I’m going to choose not to include the Georgia performance in my memory bank going forward. It simply doesn’t tell the story of the 2022 Ducks in my mind. That story is far from over. But what we saw Saturday afternoon against the No. 14 BYU Cougars — a 41-20 win for Oregon — drove home the point that this Ducks team is different than that Ducks team.
Think of it as the foreward in a book. Sure, it’s tangentially related, but doesn’t offer much context for what you’re going to read over the next several hundred pages. For the Ducks, watching them go to Atlanta in Week 1 started the juices flowing for the new era of Oregon football under Dan Lanning, but it’s become clear that their performance appears to be far beneath what they’re actually capable of.
If you want to play fair and say that the Eastern Washington game should also be included in that foreward, I will not argue. While it was more along the lines of what we’d come to see from the Ducks, the talent gap between Ducks and Eagles may have been even more vast than that between Ducks and Bulldogs.
Those two games did a good job of setting the scene and creating barometers for how to judge the season. Oregon may not win a game in as dominant of fashion as it did against EWU, but it likely will not lose as badly as it did against UGA, either.
The story of the 2022 Oregon Ducks started on Saturday. With two lopsided results in the rearview mirror, a plausible opponent was coming to Eugene. BYU was a highly respected team — ranked in the top 15 — but a team that Oregon could beat if it played up to snuff.
They did more than that.
Oregon dominated from start to finish. The end result was a 21-point victory, but it could have been far worse for the Cougars. The Ducks led 38-7 midway through the third quarter. It got so out of hand that Lanning pulled starting quarterback Bo Nix — perhaps prematurely — and decided to give backup QB Ty Thompson some experience. Of course, BYU sensed that Oregon let off the gas a bit, and in turn scored a pair of touchdowns to pull within three scores, but the Ducks’ lead was never close to threatened.
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Nix was remarkable, throwing for 222 yards and 2 touchdowns with a 72% completion percentage. He also added three touchdowns on the ground, a career high for the veteran transfer. Bucky Irving was dynamic on the ground, becoming the first Duck to cross the 100-yard mark this season. Troy Franklin and Terrance Ferguson once again teamed to form a lethal duo in the passing game, combining for 108 yards and two touchdowns. The defense was not flashy, but rather gritty and relentless, holding the Cougars short on four fourth-down conversion attempts.
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With the performance, the Ducks gave new life, and new energy to a fan base that wants so badly to will a team to big victories inside Autzen Stadium. They got the chance on Saturday and were rewarded for their efforts.
It’s fortunate this game kicked off in the noon window on Saturday. It’s also fortunate it was nationally broadcast on Fox, rather than the Pac-12 Network.
That means the nation had a chance to see the Ducks turn things around.
We know everyone was watching in Week 1 when Oregon was manhandled by the Bulldogs. I feel confident saying few people saw the Ducks get back on their feet with 10 touchdowns against Eastern Washington, though. That’s what made this game so important in the grand scheme of things. It jump-started the conversation for Oregon on a national level. In the coming days, don’t be surprised to hear some renowned analysts saying “what about the Ducks?” on various podcasts or talking-head debate shows.
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I’m not saying that Oregon should be thrown into the mix for the College Football Playoff or even be considered as being in contention. For the first time all year, though, I started to think on Saturday about how the Georgia loss may not be a big part of the Ducks’ case against them anymore.
Maybe it goes back to those excuses I talked about earlier. Maybe it’s just that the Bulldogs could actually be that good. But I can envision a world where, should Oregon make it through its next six games unscathed and enter a two-game homestand against Washington and Utah — a pair of teams who figure to be ranked at that time — there are people out there who could be making the case for the Ducks to be considered for the CFP.
“I look at that loss against Georgia and I throw it out,” one analyst might say to another. “It was Lanning’s first game as a head coach, and the odds were stacked against them in a major way.”
“You’re right,” another analyst answers. “Since then, the Ducks haven’t blinked, and they look to be well on their way to a spot in the Pac-12 Championship game.”
It’s a made-up conversation, yes, but one that wouldn’t be surprising to hear in a couple of months’ time. Saturday’s win over BYU made it so these thoughts can once again begin for Oregon fans.
It would be a wild story for the Ducks to bounce back from a loss like they suffered to start the year and make anything positive from this season. Should they falter, there are a lot of excuses that could shoulder the load and detract blame from Lanning and the coaching staff, not that he’d allow it.
After watching Oregon on Saturday, though, I don’t think that’s going to be an issue for the Ducks. I think their story is just beginning.
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