Former President Barack Obama once said, “Our destiny is not written for us, our destiny is written by us.”
All season long the destiny, and goal of this Oregon football team has been to win a championship.
And not just a conference championship but a national championship.
And now these Ducks have that opportunity.
On Friday evening in Las Vegas, the No. 5 ranked Ducks will face No. 3 Washington in a rematch the entire college football universe has been waiting to see. ( 5:00 PM KICK – ABC-TV )
At stake,…the final Pac-12 conference football championship and a likely berth in the College Football Playoff.
In college football, it’s never easy to play a team twice in the same season.
Conventional wisdom and odds suggest the team that lost the first game will likely win the rematch.
And if you certainly look at the trajectory of both the Ducks and Huskies to this point, it’s the Ducks that are consistently getting better while UW has remained average and winning by a slim margin.
But still, there is peril in playing the same team twice in the same season.
“I really won’t get in the specifics of the game plan,” said Lanning Monday evening in the Hatfield Dowlin Complex.
“There’s critical moments we didn’t win, right? You look at some critical downs, some critical situations that we didn’t win. We didn’t walk away and feel we dominated in each phase. In each phase, there were pieces we won and pieces we lost. But really, it’s about attacking some of those moments.
“As far as what you do differently or what you do the same I’m probably not going to hop into that because I don’t necessarily want to tell anybody else what we’re doing.”
Lanning has certainly faced this same situation in the past.
In 2021, his final season at Georgia, his Bulldogs lost to Alabama in the SEC Championship game but came back to beat the Crimson Tide in the National Championship game.
“I think you pull experience from every experience you’ve had in your life” explained Lanning when asked about his 2021 games with Alabama.
“That’s certainly one that is similar from the standpoint of you gotta play the game. Every time you go out there and play the game there’s an opportunity for it to go one way or another.
“We’re certainly going to use the first game as a place to look at where we could have improved and attack a lot of those places and try to figure out where their strengths are and attack those as well.”
( MONDAY BRIEFING ) DAN LANNING TALKS REMATCH WITH WASHINGTON