Oregon seemed to be upbeat and ready to move on after Saturday’s season-opening loss.
Certainly, a lot of self-evaluation is in order, but according to head coach Dan Lanning his team went out on Monday and had a very good practice after such a difficult loss.
Message number one from Lanning, put the previous game behind them and focus on Eastern Washington, who is an extremely talented team from the FCS and runs a wide-open aerial offense.
But first, there is plenty of improvement that can be made.
“Our guys are anxious, extremely anxious to get back to work. That being said, I think every one of our players acknowledged we need the work in between now and and the game,” Lanning said on Monday evening at the Hatfield Dowlin Complex.
“We have Eastern Washington on the schedule, but our opponent right now is Oregon and our guys went out there and worked their tails off today on a Monday practice. We had a lot of corrections, went and hit those corrections first got out there and got to work. And I know they’re fired up to get back on the field again and prove they’re better than they played.”
Oregon should expect game-week practices to be much tougher than usual leading up to Saturdays. Lanning said he wants practices to be much more difficult than the game itself.
The results of the Georgia game showed that.
“It’s all about consistency and accountability,” Lanning said.
“I think the process has to be really consistent. First, we watch it with our staff, do a quality control write-up of every piece of that trip, including the way travel went,…how the hotel was,… what our meal was,… the whole prep.
“We go and evaluate regardless of results. So it starts there. Then we started off this morning with a recap of the game, followed by a corrections walk, go back and walk through every single correction from the game,…what we know we can make an immediate improvement on and we carry that over into the next opponent before we start that next practice.”
After a deep dive into the film, Lanning and his staff pinpointed the primary areas of improvement and certainly have their work cut out for them if improvement is to be found.
“There’s a lot more than a single call that affected that game” explained Lanning.
“We said game one was going to be decided on takeaways, penalties, and tackling. I think if you look at that game we had two takeaways,…I think we were more penalized and I know we missed more tackles. We missed a lot of tackles and we didn’t break tackles as much on the other side of the ball and I think that’s the result of that game.”
On the injury front, Lanning did share news about defensive tackle Popo Aumavae.
According to Lanning Aumavae will be out for the remainder of the season due to a foot injury he suffered leading up to the Georgia game.
Aumavae is expected to have surgery on his foot this week.
It’s a significant loss for the Oregon defense. Aumavae was a First-Team All-Pac-12 selection a year ago.