With two weeks until Georgia, Oregon fans need to value growth and get expectations in order
There are pros and cons to scheduling one of your biggest games of the year for the first week of the season. On one hand, you have months to prepare for the opponent and can spend more than just a few days drawing up schemes and working to devise a game plan that might successfully pick apart the team on the other side of the field.
On the other hand, a young team might struggle early in the season, not yet knowing the ins and outs of the game plan and failing to put it all together in Week 1.
When you’re the Oregon Ducks, dealing with a new coaching staff, a new quarterback, and the defending national champion Georgia Bulldogs, it seems the timing might be more advantageous had the game come later in the season.
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We are now less than two weeks from kickoff on Sept. 3 at 12:30 PT. Across the country, you can feel confident in saying that many teams are starting to put the fall-camp mentality behind them and get into game prep. For the Ducks — a team that has been working hard to install a new scheme on both offense and defense while feeling out a first depth chart under Dan Lanning — that will have to wait.
“We’re gonna keep focusing on us right now,” Lanning said on Saturday after the second scrimmage of the season. “We’re going to adjust our days a little bit, but the focus is still certainly on us. We haven’t transitioned to Game 1 yet. We’ll get at some point where we start to introduce you know, opponent vs. opponent, but we’re not to that point yet.”
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I asked defensive coordinator Tosh Lupoi a similar question earlier in the week, hoping to see if he’d give me a morsel of his plan to stop Georgia’s All-American tight end Brock Bowers. Instead, Lupoi was focused squarely on the six inches in front of his team’s face.
“We’ve got so much more to go just with our own team. That’s really where the focus is, you know, improving every day on ourselves,” Lupoi said. “When it gets closer to game week, we’ll start ramping it up as far as opponent preparation.”
From the sounds of it after Saturday’s scrimmage, the Ducks need to focus a little bit harder.
There were four interceptions thrown that Lanning could recall, and several fumbles to boot. Early on, reports are that the offense was moving the ball well and even had a couple of touchdowns from inside the red zone, but a lot of the positive momentum evaporated under the heat of turnovers and mistakes born out of players trying too hard to make things happen.
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“I think most of the decisions that ended up being bad decisions today were somebody trying to make something out of nothing, and trying to create a play when they didn’t need to,” Lanning said. “A bad play turned into a worse play, you know, and that’s something we have to do a better job of.”
The notion of not making a bad play worse goes directly in line with what offensive coordinator Kenny Dillingham said on Friday about what makes a good quarterback.
“It’s not necessarily the great plays that make SportsCenter, but do your bad plays make SportsCenter?” Dillingham asked.
My guess is that Saturday’s worst plays probably would have made the highlight package, but for the wrong reasons. There were tipped balls that turned into interceptions, and fumbles that deflated any momentum. While a lot of the blame can be placed on players who need to perform better, Lanning was not afraid to point the finger at himself for needing to improve on Saturday either.
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“I mismanaged the game situation here today where we could have got a clocked play in that I want to get better,” Lanning said. “You know, the clock was running and we probably hurried to get a field goal. I would have gone back and done that differently.”
Credit to Lanning for looking at where he can improve. He is a rookie head coach with only a spring game and two scrimmages of experience. He needs the practice of managing his team in game situations and keeping an eye on the clock.
The clock is running out, though, and the bright lights of the Mercedes-Benz Stadium are inching closer.
“The thing that I think’s gonna help me be successful is I have really good coaches around me and I can lean on those guys for moments of growth.”
Expectations for the Ducks are going to be a tricky beast this season. The one thing that makes many college football fans so unique and passionate is their unbridled belief that this is their year, and the coaching staff has put the perfect team in place to win, with the exact right scheme to out-fox any opponent. The Ducks are not immune to this type of thinking.
I’m not here to say that Lanning isn’t the next coming of Bear Bryant or even a Northwestern version of Pete Carroll at USC. I do know that it would probably be a good exercise for every Oregon fan to take a few minutes over the next couple of days and set straight your realistic expectations for the Ducks this season.
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I’m on record as saying that a 9-3 season will be a success in my eyes this year. I don’t think they’ll beat Georgia. I think they will win a tough game against BYU. I will reserve a loss for either UCLA or Utah late in the season.
Anything better than 9-3 is a win. Anything worse than that certainly doesn’t mean the sky is falling.
This is a young team, a young staff, and a start to the new era of Oregon football. With all of the good Lanning has done in his first nine months in rebuilding a broken roster, bringing together a passionate base of alumni, and recruiting at an incredibly high level, I think he has bought a period of good graces. If it takes a season for the on-field product to get up to fan expectations, so be it.
“We got better today. There’s a lot to clean up, but today was a good practice.”
That’s a quote from Lanning after Saturday’s scrimmage. If I opened up the recording app on my phone, I bet I could find a similar sentence that has been uttered by the Ducks’ head coach every time that he’s spoken with media members this fall.
Saturday marked two weeks until the first game of the year. Oregon is still working hard to get ready to take on the defending champions.
You can feel confident that they’re moving in the right direction.
List
18 notable quotes from Dan Lanning after Ducks' final scrimmage of fall camp
