The Rereadables: Oregon's route to No. 1 began with a 46-point loss
Our updated gamer from Oregon's 2022 loss to Georgia.
Welcome back to The I-5 Corridor’s Rereadables, where we periodically revisit some of our favorite game stories from over the years with updated thoughts and footnotes. With Oregon reaching No. 1 in the AP Poll this week for the first time since 2012, we wanted to go back to the beginning of the Dan Lanning era to see if there were any signs in that 49-3 loss to Georgia in Atlanta that would point to Oregon’s rise to No. 1 less than three years later.
Here’s our take from Sept. 3, 2022.
Editor’s note: If you read this story on the web or on the app, footnotes will show when you hover over the number. It’s much less scrolling than in e-mail.
ATLANTA — Imagine if Oregon would have released the two-deep.
Remember, that was one of the biggest talking points coming into this game here at Mercedes-Benz Stadium.1
Who would be starting at quarterback?2
What’s the running back rotation? 3
Who exactly is going to be playing where?
Dan Lanning wouldn’t have any of that, even as we learned so much about Oregon’s new coach this week. The Athletic did a deep dive about the goals on Lanning’s bathroom mirror. The Oregonian went to North Kansas City and walked the streets where the former Georgia defensive coordinator grew up. His face was all over College GameDay Saturday morning.4
But as the first game of his head coaching career approached, Lanning kept all information about his actual football team hidden inside the Hatfield-Dowlin Complex.
“If I felt like it was an advantage I would tell you guys” Lanning said last week. “I don’t.”5
Georgia won 49-3 anyway — a win so dominant that all the game records the defending national champions set took up a third of the notes page put out by the Chick-fil-A Game staff.
Largest margin of victory: 46.
Most points scored: 49.
Most first downs passing: 20
Most net passing yards: 439
And no kicker in game history has converted on more than the seven extra points Jack Podlensy laced through the uprights. To be fair, Oregon did tie a record: No team in this game’s history has scored fewer points than the Ducks’ three.6
“The locker room is hurting a little bit,” Lanning said. “…[Georgia] has good guys and you can’t afford to play poorly against a good team.”
To be clear, Oregon didn’t need to win this game. This has been a turbulent period for the program since Mario Cristobal hightailed out of Eugene back in December.7 The entire coaching staff changed over. Some players left. A letter was signed. Realignment came.8 Tragedy struck.
Then, in Lanning’s first career game, he had to face No. 3 Georgia. He had to face the coach in Kirby Smart who gave him the biggest opportunity of his life and a roster more talented than Oregon has ever seen.
Georgia had 15 players taken in this summer’s NFL Draft and still has a roster that harbors 15 5-star players. The only time one of Oregon’s five 5-stars did anything notable Saturday came in the second quarter when Justin Flowe nearly landed in the locker room after a late hit on Georgia quarterback Stetson Bennett.9
“They’re obviously a really, really great team,” Oregon center Alex Forsyth said. “Really talented. Played hard. I don’t know what their penalties were, but I don’t think they had a whole lot.” 10
The only time the sliver of green among a sea of red in the Northeast endzone stands had a reason to cheer came in the fourth quarter when, facing Georgia’s backups, the Ducks got their first third-down stop of the game. It was Georgia’s only possession that didn’t result in a touchdown.
Oregon had no possessions that resulted in a touchdown.
Aside from a few drives that ate up some yards before stalling at midfield, the long-awaited quarterback reveal turned into a dud. Bo Nix threw two interceptions — one bad, the other egregious — and played the entire game. Oregon’s final drive stalled on the 2-yard line after a first-and-goal turned into a first-and-long after a delay of game penalty.
Nix tapped his chest and said “My bad” to his line after that one.
“It’s just tough to move the ball against those guys,” Nix said.
Nix finished 21-of-37 for 173 yards. He also led the Ducks on the ground with 37 yards.
“We have other quarterbacks on our team that obviously can compete, but Bo is our quarterback,” Lanning said. “But he’s also got to figure out how he can improve, just like we can as a staff.”11
Lanning hosted a meeting with his staff Saturday morning to make sure one thing was clear: No matter what happened in the game — win or lose — it wouldn’t change any of Oregon’s goals for the season. The Ducks can still win a Pac-12 title12 and, on paper, the College Football Playoff isn’t technically out of reach.
At least something’s on paper.13
— Tyson Alger, The I-5 Corridor
OK, so it’s always a little indulgent for writers to complain about stuff like the depth chart and injuries. Yes, those were things college football coaches shared for a hundred years. No, a lot of them don’t do it with regularity now. It is what it is.
But I do think this showed an early window into how Lanning runs his program. He’s a coach who is incredibly approachable and willing to adapt in many aspects. But there are certain things he’s set in his way about, and avoiding giving anything away that he believes may be a competitive edge is one of them.
Here in 2024, Lanning just closed practice access — there are still interviews after — for the first time this year. There’s a little less complaining about it when they’re No. 1.
Bo Nix won that one, because of course he did, but let’s not pretend a few of you weren’t all aboard the Ty Thompson train.
Oregon’s running game was putrid against Georgia, but interestingly enough it was Jordan James (7) receiving two more carries than Bucky Irving in the first game of the Lanning era. Irving would go on to rush for 1,058 yards that season, 1,180 yards the next and is currently RB1 on the Tampa Bay Buccaneers depth chart.
Through seven games in 2024 at Oregon’s No. 1, James is 14th in the nation with 717 yards.
While it’s not told with quite the frequency of every Oregon fan’s favorite drinking game — knock one back whenever the broadcast mentions Tez Johnson is Bo Nix’s brother — after three seasons as Oregon’s coach, guys, I think most people know Lanning took that drive to Pittsburgh in the middle of the night.
Lanning also doesn’t believe in Rat Poison. When asked on Monday about Oregon’s newly minted ranking: “Who cares?”
The game once known as the Chick-fil-A Kickoff Game is now the Aflac Kickoff Game, and the Ducks now share this low-point distinction with Clemson, who got Georgia’d to start this season 34-3.
Oregon has been in worse spots after a coach left — Willie Taggart jumping for Florida State a year after UO fired a staff that took it to a national championship game was not a high point — but it is remarkable that the Ducks are No. 1 less than three years after Cristobal angry-forhead-veined his way through his press conference after that Pac-12 Championship debacle, then awkwardly Zoomed in for his Alamo Bowl press conference from the airport.
Like, it’s only been 1,051 days since this:
And now Oregon has reached heights Cristobal’s Ducks never achieved.
This Georgia game was played four weeks after USC thought it finally pulled the rug out from under the Ducks. The Trojans — and the Bruins — would be joining the Big Ten, leaving the Ducks and Huskies and Bears and Sun Devils and Beavers and Wildcats and Cardinal and Cougars and Utes and Buffaloes behind. How could a school like Oregon continue to poach the best talent from USC’s own backyard when it would be withering away in some forgotten conference?
Remember when the Trojans spent part of the next year trying to close the door behind them?
Anywho, midway through the first season of the new Big Ten era, USC is 3-4 and coming off a loss to Maryland, while Oregon is No. 1 with a roster filled with contributors from the Southern California area such as Matayo Uiagalelei, who leads the Ducks with 5.5 sacks.
When the Ducks and Bulldogs met in 2022, Georgia’s roster had the second most talent in the country — per 247 — with 19 5-star and 47 four-star recruits. The Ducks were ninth at the time with four 5-stars and 44 4-stars.
Three years later, Georgia’s 14 5-stars and 55-four-stars still put them at No. 2 behind Alabama, while the Ducks have slightly closed the gap, sitting at No. 6 with six five-stars and 50 4-stars.
Back in July, I asked Lanning where that progress shows up the most.
“The offensive and defensive line is drastically different,” he said. “But I think across the board, our team's more talented and deeper than it was when I first got here. That always happens with transition, you're going to have some guys that come in and go, you’re going to have some guys that maybe don't fit exactly what you've done in the past, and then some guys, they're probably just we're in the wrong spot to start with. But yeah, my job next year is to make sure our roster’s even better than it was the previous year. Our goal is always to out-recruit the people that are on our team, and then develop the guys that are on our team to be better versions of themselves. So yeah, that's the challenge, right? When Kirby first got to Georgia, his team doesn't look like that, right? It doesn't look at all like it did. Compared to now, it's a completely different team. So I think that's just that means your program is growing, it's getting better.”
Forsyth is one of three Ducks from this game — Nix and Franklin being the others — now on the Denver Broncos roster.
I was a little worried to go back and re-read my Game 1 take on Nix, because I do remember not being impressed — at all — by his performance that night. Nix, of course, would go on to play two seasons at Oregon as well as almost any other quarterback in Oregon history. I feel like I kept it in check.
In retrospect, I love seeing that Nix took every snap of this game. Lanning and then-offensive coordinator Kenny Dillingham believed in their quarterback, and they knew that every rep — even in a blowout — would matter for development in a season where, if the cards broke the right way, they’d have a shot at the playoffs.
That game obviously didn’t look like the Ducks were close to a playoff team, but they looked close by the end of the year — a trend that’s continued over the last two seasons. In 2023, the Ducks looked suspect in Week 2 against Texas Tech. In 2024, it took false starts against Idaho and Boise State before this No. 1 train got moving.
Every coach in America talks about getting better each week. Lanning’s Ducks are an exemplar.
If it wasn’t for that Michael Penix Jr. and those damn meddling kids!
I’m going to go ahead and pat myself on the back for that kicker.
In retrospect, the roster Lanning inherited from Cristobal turned out to be quite underwhelming. Thank goodness for the transfer portal. A lot of the highly touted guys on that two-deep most Oregon fans wanted to start - I recall being really upset at the RB rotation as Dollars and Cardwell barely saw the field - did not go on to live up to their recruiting hype.
This type of article is really interesting! Fun to look back on. Luckily for me that was the only game in the last few years I didn't watch, as I was on a day trip to Crater Lake with my family. It saved me from forming some impulsive decisions on that team.