Dan Lanning on Oregon's Big Ten move: 'Every coach, player wants to play in big games'

In 2024, the Oregon Ducks will kick off the college football season as members of the Big Ten conference, joining three other former Pac-12 schools: USC, UCLA, and Washington.

A move of this magnitude has undoubtedly excited and rallied the fan base as the Ducks will get to invade another conference and take on the likes of Wisconsin, Iowa, Ohio State, and the defending national champions, Michigan. But how excited is Oregon’s head coach, Dan Lanning, about the prospects of the move?

On a recent episode of the Hard Count with On3’s J.D. Pickell, Lanning revealed just how excited he is to be a part of Big Ten football and the reason behind it.

“Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of it — great football, first off. You know you’re going to play against some of the premier programs in college football,” he began. “There are a lot of these places that I haven’t been able to go to as a coach. And I’ve been to a lot of different stops, in my stops, in my time in college ball. So, just getting to go to some of these places for the first time, I think it would be a lot of fun to get to play some of these teams. I think it’ll be a lot of fun.

“And as crazy as college football has been in the last three years, there’s certainly some clarity for us to Oregon with the conference that we’re joining and where that positions us for the future.”

Originally, it was just the Los Angeles-based universities, USC and UCLA, that elected to vote for a new conference home. But after the Pac-12 passed up on a deal that the Big 12 would eventually make, coupled with previous uncertainty about a TV deal, Oregon paired up with Washington and followed their two California rivals to the Big Ten. And in doing so, it ensured stability for the institution’s athletic department going forward.

Money aside, Oregon is joining one of the more prestigious conferences in college football. The Big Ten can proudly boast that they won the first-ever College Football Playoff with the Ohio State Buckeyes win in 2012, and the last in the four-team format, with the Michigan Wolverines winning this year’s championship. Oregon and Lanning will now have the opportunity to face off against at least two other elite programs that will be consistently in the running for the national championship with a national championship pedigree. And that is something all college football fans should be fired up for.