Dan Lanning after Colorado win: 'I need to humble myself'

Oregon put an abrupt halt to Colorado‘s Cinderella story Saturday afternoon, beating the Buffs 42-6 like it was 2022 again.

Before kickoff, Ducks head coach Dan Lanning’s pregame speech made the rounds on social media. The viral post of Lanning saw him basically saying the Colorado fairy tale is through, and that the Buffs are fighting for clicks, and Oregon is fighting for wins. Lanning addressed his comments after the fact.

“I get passionate at times. I get a little excited about what I want to accomplish for our team. And I just wanna say, I need to humble myself a little bit,” Lanning said after the blowout win. “This is one game, and I’m not satisfied. What I just told the players, we’re about to go play great a quarterback. We’re about to go play great teams moving forward, and it’s about how good we can become. Right? It’s not really about who we play, it’s about Oregon versus Oregon every week.”

The best version of the Ducks showed up on both sides of the ball Saturday. Defensively, the Ducks held one of the most prolific offenses to 199 total yards on the afternoon. Offensively, the Ducks were lights out from the starting whistle.

Oregon wrapped things up before the end of the second half, entering the break with a 35-0. Bo Nix finished the matchup with five incompletions on 33 attempts to go along with four total touchdowns on the afternoon. The Ducks compiled 522 total yards on offense, including 240 on the ground on a 6.3-yard per-carry clip.

Lanning didn’t think the speech would have that big of an effect on the game. Rather, it was the preparation and determination of his players and staff to be the best version of themselves on a national stage.

“We do a pregame speech every week. I guess there was a camera in there this time, right? So it doesn’t really change our approach,” Lanning said. “We’ll always have a message for our team. Sometimes it’s to get them fired up. Sometimes we don’t necessarily need the brimstone.

“There is no speech that wins games, players win games, right? Our players went out there and they won the game and our players went out there and executed and our players went out there and decided to make a decision to have poise, be focused, play with their pads, and not with anything else.”

Next up for Oregon is a road matchup against Stanford, where the Ducks figure to be heavy favorites over the ailing Cardinal.