The Oregon Ducks moved a major step closer to another trip to the College Football Playoff on Saturday with an impressive 42-27 home win over No. 15 USC in the biggest game of the Week 13 schedule.
That win improved them to 10-1 on the season and makes next week’s game at Washington a “win and in” situation for the Ducks, whether they make the Big Ten title game or not.
In his postgame press conference, Oregon coach Dan Lanning was asked what he hopes the College Football Playoff committee takes away from the Ducks’ play this season, and he couldn’t help but take a swipe at the SEC, where many of the top contenders were playing Sun Belt, Conference USA or FCS opponents.
“We just played a really good team and we beat them,” Lanning said. “A lot of times we play really good teams that become unranked all of a sudden, that’s not our fault, right — maybe it is our fault — but all that we’re worried about is playing the teams we play and doing the job we need to do and we did that job today. I think that the proof’s in the pudding. We played a good team and we beat them. All we can do next week is try and do the same thing.
“This conference is a really good conference. It’s competitive. We didn’t play Chattanooga State today, like some other places. We competed. So with that being said, it’s tough playing nine conference games. It’s tough playing in this league, and we got to take advantage of playing a good team today and attacking that.”
First off, UT Chattanooga is the only college football program in Chattanooga (Chattanooga State does exist but doesn’t have a football program) and, as Dan Mullen will tell you, they’re an excellent football team. Second, I think the response from most SEC programs would be to ask what the difference is between opening your season with an FCS opponent, as Oregon did, and playing one at the end of it — to Oregon’s credit, they did face a good FCS team in Montana State.
What Lanning’s doing is understandable though, as so much gets made of the challenge of the SEC week-to-week, while the Big Ten doesn’t get the same respect. A lot of that comes down to the fact that the bottom of the Big Ten looks considerably worse than the top of it, but there’s certainly an argument to be made that the middle class of the Big Ten doesn’t get the respect they deserve relative to similar programs in the SEC.
That’s the more salient point in Lanning’s answer here, but stumping for the Big Ten being better top to bottom than it’s been credited for wouldn’t grab headlines in the same way as the Chattanooga State swipe. Lanning is just doing his part to stump for his team to get the best possible seeding, for whatever that’s worth for a team that almost assuredly won’t be in the top 4, and couldn’t resist a chance at a drive-by on his SEC rivals on a week where his team got to enjoy the spotlight mostly to themselves.
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