Dan Lanning announces Oregon will hold spring game in 2025

After weeks of teams announcing their plans for the annual spring game, Oregon has chimed in. The Ducks will host a traditional spring game under Dan Lanning in a few weeks.

Lanning told The Oregonian’s James Crepea that his team will be best served by continuing as usual with the spring game. Others have scrapped the traditional game based on tampering concerns or worries about the potential length of the season given the expanded College Football Playoff.

“I think it’s the best way for us to get better,” Lanning said. “For me it’s the right way to cap off the spring. As long as I’m here we’ll be doing spring games.”

Nebraska first brought the issue to the forefront when coach Matt Rhule noted his team would not have a spring game based on tampering concerns. In the NIL and transfer portal era, he deemed a public spring game as a potential risk.

“Fundamentally, I hate to say it like this, it’s really because last year, we were one of the more televised spring games and I dealt with a lot of people offering our players a lot of opportunities after that,” Rhule said. “To go out and bring in a bunch of players, and then showcase them for all the other schools to watch, that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

“The word ‘tampering’ doesn’t exist anymore. It’s just absolute, free, open, common market. I don’t necessarily want to open up to the outside world. I don’t want these guys all being able to watch our guys and say, ‘Wow, he looks like a pretty good player. Let’s go get him.’”

Others, like Texas, have canceled for a different reason. That’s the workload that players, particularly on playoff-caliber teams,, now face.

“No, we’re not going to have a spring game,” coach Steve Sarkisian said. “A couple of reasons why. Over the last two years, we’ve played 30 games. That’s a lot for college football. Fourteen two years ago, 16 this year. I just mentioned, we’ve had 25 guys get invited to the NFL Combine the last two years, so we have a lot of young players on our roster. We have 21 mid-year high school kids that just showed up.

“The development that’s needed for these guys need to get ready for the fall is a little bit different than it used to be. Our approach is going to be a little more NFL driven, kind of more of an OTA style early on as we grow into more of the scrimmage formats in the second half of spring ball. I just don’t know (if) rolling the ball out and playing the game when we only get 15 practices is the best for us to maximize the opportunities that we get. It’s going to be a little bit of a different approach, but I think college football is changing right now. We need to do a great job as coaches of adapting to college football. That’s what we’re trying to do, and I think that’s going to be good for our team.”

You can view a running list of spring game decisions announced by programs here, which On3 is tracking. The list will be updated periodically as more decisions are made and announced.