Let’s get this out of the way first. Dan Lanning was a good hire and he’s going to be at Oregon for a long time. As a first-year head coach, he had his team one win away from going to the Pac-12 title game. A record of 9-3 is nothing to sneeze at. More importantly, Lanning wants to be at Oregon. There’s no “dream job” destination for him. Eugene is the destination.
But his inexperience and more notably, the inexperience of his staff showed up in a big way in the 38-34 loss to Oregon State on Saturday. Lanning didn’t have a voice of reason on the staff to tell him that maybe going for it on 4th-and-1 on your own 29 with a less-than-healthy quarterback with the lead may not be the best idea in the world.
If Lanning is the coach Athletic Director Rob Mullens thinks he is, these kinds of mistakes won’t happen again in Year 2 of the Lanning Era. They just can’t.
Oregon is going to look vastly different next season and in the coming seasons. Lanning will have many more of his recruits in the program that fit exactly the style he wants to play, especially on defense. This obviously wasn’t the kind of defense Lanning wants to roll out there, a defense that gives up nearly 300 yards rushing to a rival that basically told the Ducks what they were doing and Oregon still couldn’t stop it.
A lot of the defensive players were recruited by the previous regime and for some reason, they never really gelled, except for the Utah game. That was just a taste of what the Ducks can expect in the future.
The Ducks will also have a new offensive coordinator as Kenny Dillingham bolted to Tempe to take the Arizona State job. Oregon needs a little stability in that position. It’s been a revolving door for quite some time now. It’s natural for the OC to look for a head coaching job elsewhere, but Lanning needs to find someone that is ready to make his mark at a school and be there for at least a few recruiting cycles. You can be sure other schools are using this fact against the Ducks in recruiting.
Oregon’s offense became predictable in the OSU game and the Beavers figured it out quickly. Did Dillingham check out? We’ll never know, but it certainly looked like it.
These are just growing pains for a new coach, but it was just even more frustrating when the Ducks could very easily be 11-1 at this point and preparing to face No. 4 USC in Vegas in what was sure to be an epic battle. These problems could have been avoided way before the Washington and Oregon State losses.
Oregon is expected to go to the Holiday Bowl in San Diego. That’s a good consolation prize after losing to the Beavers. But it could have been a lot better if not for many self-inflicted wounds. For the Ducks sake, those first-year mistakes can’t happen again.