Dan Lanning talks comebacks, composure, and winning in Lubbock
For most head coaches, walking away from a game where you racked up 14 penalties for 124 yards is a bit of a sour experience. The team won, but there were so many mistakes that it could be hard to enjoy it.
For Dan Lanning and the Oregon Ducks, enjoyment wasn’t a problem on Saturday night after a comeback victory over the Texas Tech Red Raiders. It was a game that was in doubt for Oregon for much of the contest, trailing 27-18 midway through the third quarter, and then down 30-28 with just over a minute on the clock.
A go-ahead field goal from Camden Lewis followed by a game-sealing pick-six from Jeffrey Bassa managed to make all of the early miscues go away for the night, at least. The Ducks were able to celebrate the only thing that mattered: a victory.
After the win in Lubbock, Lanning met with media members and talked about the composure that it took and the confidence that his team got from the win.
Here are the most notable quotes from that presser:
Opening Statement
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Lanning: “We talk about a game that took all 60 minutes, it took every second. I think that game could look a lot different if we didn’t shoot ourselves in the foot so much with penalties on defense and offense alike. Be better on third down in some situations. I thought their quarterback played with incredible toughness. He was able to run the ball on us. There’s some issues walking in, our team’s excited to go fix issues. That being said, really tough environment to go play in. A lot of teams would have lost their cool when things weren’t going well and our guys kept their composure throughout the game. They were calm and composed, they had a plan for adversity and then went out there and executed when it mattered.”
Thoughts On Final Drive
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Question: What was the mindset for you guys going into that final drive with 5:09 on the clock?
Lanning: “Once it got inside two minutes, we decided we didn’t want to give it back to them, and try to take as much time off as possible. And we’re in a situation there at the very end of the game where we want to try to get a first down, stay in bounds. Jordan ended up getting going out of bounds, would have at least made them you that timeout before the last drive. And there’s a lot of situational football that we’re really, you know, caught up on that we didn’t execute the right way tonight. I think we probably could have gone back and thrown for it. But we’d made a strategic decision about ‘Hey, we’re gonna try to leave the least amount of time possible, make them use their timeouts, right? Go and kick the win and then we’ll play you know, for that situation knowing where we were at.”
Comeback Mindset
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Question: When you are down by 9 points, what is the mindset for you guys like on the sideline?
Lanning: “Winning is not words, it’s action. We’re talking about winning the next play. Alright, don’t worry about the future. Don’t worry about the past. Let’s live in the present. Right now, let’s win the next play. Let’s anticipate what we’re going to see. Let’s have a plan to execute well on this play. And there’s a lot of moments where we’ve got to execute a lot better. Right? But I thought our players did that, they lived in the moment, they didn’t focus on outcomes they focused on the standard — what we have to go execute right now and it put us in position to win this game.”
Winning in Lubbock
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Question: How much confidence does it give your team knowing that you guys can win in an environment like this and use this to your advantage going forward?
Lanning: “Their team has a lot of fight and Coach McGuire’s guys play with extreme toughness and they create issues. They’ve got some good players on that team, right. I think they’re a two-headed monster, a different team when they play at home, right? They have a lot of confidence. They feed off the crowd. You know, they can ride momentum waves and they created some momentum tonight. What was good about us is we didn’t let that moment stop us. And we had to create some takeaways tonight, right? Those takeaways ended up being huge. You know, as a game where we almost had a critical takeaway for us there at the end, we gotta do a better job of taking taking care of the ball. But we created takeaways and they didn’t have the takeaways, you know, that’s the place that’s gonna help us.”
Fixing Penalties
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Question: You talk about fixing penalties, but how do you actually go about doing that in practice?
Lanning: “So they were using a cadence on defense that was similar to our cadence on offense, and it was causing some issues with their moves. But we gotta go work stems in practice, but it’s gonna be something we’re gonna see the rest of the year. So you know, we got to become the best team in the world at dealing with stems. They were stemming the front. We were able to catch them on one or two, right when we stepped on the front, but it’s something that we’re gonna drill in our guys’ heads.
You know. the pass interference, I thought a lot of those were panics. We talked about this game going in, you know, preventing contested catches. The reality is they made a contested catch on their very first play where they had a holding right down there in the red area. But outside of that they didn’t make a ton of contested catches. We really bailed them out by giving pass interference. So you know, we got to be calm, cool and collected, are we in phase out of phase and recreate that in practice? So the best way to attack that is to recreate the exact same situation and practice and work it over and over and over and not until you get it right until you can’t get it wrong. And that’s what we’ll do in the future.”
Timely Turnovers
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Question: You guys had some incredibly timely takeaways with the interception at the end of the game, and the interception with Tech on a short field, plus the sack-fumble. What goes into those coming at such big times in the game?
Lanning: “Yeah, I just think ultimately, we talked about being composed in moments like those moments and making sure that we’re able to lean on where our players know the best, right? We’re not going out there calling exotic defenses in those scenarios like what can we execute with speed and great execution without overthinking and you know, our guys in those moments were able to execute at a high level because we call defenses we run a million times. Same thing offensively, plays that we’ve run a million times. The presentation might be different. But in those moments, it’s really really critical. You know, we talked about going in the game, every sack’s a fumble. How do you create that by attacking the ball? When we drill that every week we drill you know, we call it rodeo drill or we’re trying to sack the guy. We’re always trying to knock the ball out. You know, I think a lot of those moments showed up in this game.”
Camden Lewis
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Question: What can you say about Camden’s performance tonight and how solid he has been for you?
Lanning: “I talked to him right afterward in the locker room. He was like ‘Coach I can’t miss that. That’s a chip shot.’ I mean, we know Cam is a great kicker and we talk about composure, to have the confidence in him to say ‘Hey, we don’t want to throw it here on third down to get the first, because we know we have a guy that’s gonna be able to make this kick and put us ahead.’ For him to be able to pull that off. It’s it’s huge.”
Bo Nix
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Question: What were your overall thoughts on how Bo Nix played tonight?
Lanning: “I thought Bo played really well outside of one play tonight where he put the ball in jeopardy. He knows that, he was critiquing himself on that. And that’s what I love about Bp, right? He’s like, ‘Okay, I know I can get better.’ When your best players know they can get better, what an opportunity for us to grow as a team. And it’s not about what he is a player. It’s what that guy is as a person. Right? We have an unbelievable quarterback right now on our team. This is an unbelievable leader, an unbelievable human and he’s a freaking ballplayer. Go pull that film on Bo next time. He can win games. Watch what he’d do with his feet tonight. He’s a good decision maker. Just really proud of him and glad he’s leading our team.”
Tyler Shough
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Question: What were your overall impressions of Tyler Shough tonight?
Lanning: “I think when we were rushing four, or we got to do a better job with some of our contain. I think the pressure that we created, the majority of the night was situations when we’re rushing five. We got some guys that can win up front. We don’t need to be a team that has to rush five every time to create pressure. And we have some guys to come when we’re doing that. You know, we probably weren’t great at level rush tonight. He did a great job of taking advantage, when we had guys covered he took off and ran. So I think there’s something we can certainly improve. I need to go watch the film and see exactly what broke down, but he ran for too many yards tonight. We got to do a better job.
Young Players
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Question: Through two games now you’ve had a ton of young players see meaningful action. What gives you the confidence to put those guys out there in big moments?
Lanning: “If you’re good enough, you’re old enough. I say it for a year now. You know last year, it didn’t really necessarily matter, because there weren’t as many guys that were good enough, right? We have guys that are good enough to play for us. And they’re old enough to go play for us. I don’t care how old you are. If you can go make an impact in the game which those young players can, that’s when we’re getting better. We’re developing within our program. We’re developing young players to go make an impact in this game. I don’t know how many players we played. I think we played a lot. Last week we played 81 — it’s not gonna be close to that. We have a lot of guys that go and make an impact tonight.”
Pass Rush
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Question: The pass rush was much better tonight than we’ve seen. What did you make of the success there on defense?
Lanning: “Yeah, I think overall a completely different game. If you go back and watch the Portland State game, we created pressure, we didn’t get sacks but they didn’t give us opportunities to really create sacks. Tonight, we had some drop back passes that we could take advantage of. And guys got good pressure. You know, still some concerns about losing leverage in the pocket that we can certainly clean up. We probably got to work some more scramble drill in practice. You’ll see us do that moving forward.”
Learning from Victory
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Question: How do you walk away from this game and make sure that you get better from it and build on that confidence?
Lanning: “The first thing I plan on doing on Monday is going and showing the team all the things that I messed up, me personally. Like here’s the things that I know that I could have done a better job of and I think you can learn from this, right? As much as you can ever learn from losses, right? We got an opportunity to coach our team really hard. Because there’s a lot of things that all of us can fix. So for me, it’s really simple. We got away, we went and got a W because we have a resilient and a tough team.”
Jeffrey Bassa
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Question: What were your thoughts when you saw Bassa get that INT?
Lanning: “I was thinking go down, go down! I think there are probably some other people across the world who are really excited that he did not go down.”
Evan Williams
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Question: Tonight was Evan Williams’ first action with the team, what did you make of his performance?
Lanning: “Yeah, there were highs and lows. Evan’s a great tackler, a phenomenal player, had a couple of busts that I know he wants to have back. We’re gonna go coach, you really hard. And it’s about recreating those moments in practice. But that guy lost composure in a moment, and then he resettled in and became a really special player for our team, did a really good job. So love them and love what he’s about and really love the direction this team.”
