The Oregon Ducks under Dan Lanning in his first season as a head coach were really good.
That’s hard to dispute after a 10-3 record and a huge Holiday Bowl win over North Carolina.
Normally, there would be very little to talk about if that was the end result.
But Oregon didn’t hire Lanning to win lower-tier bowls.
With the expansion of the College Football Playoff system, the Ducks are expected to be a playoff contender in this new Pac-12 Conference.
Whether that assumption is fair or not is certainly debatable.
But it’s the reality.
There were glaring losses to two huge rivals in Washington and Oregon State that just can’t be dismissed.
Everyone knows it.
The most important person that knows it is Lanning himself and he used his year one mistakes as motivation to get better so those miscues don’t occur in 2023.
“We did a couple of studies and recently finished up a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis on our team and it’s really fun” explained Lanning at Friday’s Pac-12 Media Day.
“You get to peel back the layers, ask our guys, ‘What are our strengths What are our weaknesses?’ Our guys did a really good job of breaking that down,”
Although Lanning wouldn’t get into specifics, the analysis told the coach what he needed to get better at. That probably included a tape of the entire second half of the loss to the Beavers.
“Sometimes it’s not fun to hear what you’re not good at and it’s not fun to hear things you’ve got to get better at,” said Lanning.
“But I think our guys have done a better job at attacking that.”
One of the things Lanning has attacked is recruiting.
Oregon is recruiting at the highest level it ever has, but perhaps the most important signing this off-season was convincing quarterback Bo Nix to return for one more go-around in Eugene.
Not only did Lanning get his signal-caller back, but it sounds like he kept a pretty good babysitter in the process as well.
“Bo is part of the family,” Lanning said.
“Just the other day my wife was outside talking with some friends and I went inside and asked Bo what was going on. He said the kids just got done with basketball practice, in the shower, and headed to bed.”
Now that Nix is a fixture within the Oregon football community, he doesn’t have to think as much and just go out and play football. But if the football gig doesn’t work out, the babysitting doesn’t sound too bad either.
“It’s all about the connection that Coach Lanning talks about,” said Nix in Las Vegas on Friday.
“He put an emphasis on it and we want to be the most connected team possible and what’s better than watching his kids and making sure they’re good.”
Nix will also make sure the Ducks football team is good and he’s already done that just by being there for another season.