College Football 2024: In Dan Lanning, Oregon trusts
College Football 2024: In Dan Lanning, Oregon trusts
It's been a quick 986 days.
PORTLAND — Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve made it.
One of the most unique college football seasons we’ve ever had is set to embark this week across the state.
The Beavers have Idaho State at Reser.
The Ducks have Idaho at Autzen.
And Portland State begins its bear of a schedule — nine of its opponents this year finished ranked in the FCS’ Top 25 in 2023 — on the road in Pullman against Washington State.
The Ducks, of course, are the largest draw and will be the primary focus here on The I-5 Corridor during the 2024 football season. We will still sprinkle in features and coverage from around the state, but the fact of the matter is Oregon is the No. 3 football team in the country going into Week 1 and that simply doesn’t happen around here too often.
It’s been a decade, in fact. The Ducks were the preseason No. 3 in 2011, 2013 and 2014. But even then I can’t remember the sort of build-up that Dan Lanning’s squad has had here this fall. Back then, the Ducks were either thriving with a high-tempo offense or a generational quarterback — things that gave the otherwise undersized, overlooked Ducks a puncher’s chance when competing against Goliaths from around the country.
In 2024, the Ducks might not be playing as fast as they once were, but they do still have a very good quarterback from Hawaii and now have a roster built around him that would leave few teams around the nation wanting for more. It was almost jarring to tune into GameDay on Saturday and see Desmond Howard and Kirk Herbstreit confidently pick Oregon as their national champions.
Then again, Lanning has been telling us to expect this from the day he first landed in Eugene.
“This program is staged to compete and win national championships,” Lanning said on Dec. 14, 2021. “We won’t shy from expectations, and our goal is to compete for national championships here.”
That sounded good at the time, but it also didn’t sound far off from the similar speeches in the same auditorium given by Willie Taggart and Mario Cristobal in past years. And you’ll forgive Oregon fans if they greeted Lanning’s excitement with a healthy dose of skepticism. After all, the foundations Taggart and Cristobal laid down were abandoned as soon as they were strong enough to lift those coaches back across the country. Lanning was the fourth coach introduced at Oregon in eight years and the third consecutive with no ties to Eugene. Many — including this writer — had barely heard of the guy when he showed up with his wife and three kids at the Hatfield-Dowlin Complex on that Tuesday morning while still a member of the national title game-bound Georgia Bulldogs and told a fanbase with an exposed nerve to trust him.