Dan Lanning: "The Standard is Raised Here."

On Wednesday Oregon head coach Dan Lanning met with media to discuss his season opener with Montana State. The Ducks are rolling out a lot of new faces and hoping to avoid a slow start like they had a season ago vs Idaho.

Here are most of the top comments from Lanning in his presser and the video included at the bottom.

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Opening Statement:

“Good practice today, really on a Thursday practice schedule for us. As we have a little more time to prepare, so we’ll be able to get two Thursdays in and kind of go through our entire script on both sides of the ball. But overall, I like the compete from our guys and where we’re at.”

On Growth as a Coach:

“Yeah, probably not a ton as far as reflection, but definitely think we’re in a lot different place than we were when we first got here. Just everybody understanding what’s the task at hand, what it should look like, the standard is raised here. And certainly appreciate all the hard work from our players and staff to get us there.”

On Game Week Prep:

“Yeah, I’ve been really happy with our guys prep and the work you do. There’s a lot of unknowns when you play in game one, right? You’re going to see some stuff you haven’t prepped for, right? You’re going to see some stuff you haven’t. And again, that’s where rules have to take over, but I’m really happy with where they’re at.”

On Dakorien Moore Mentally:

“I’ve said it before. I think he’s a perfectionist. He wants to do things the right way, and he’s hard on himself, right? But part of that means that you spend a lot of time in preparation, and preparation is going to create confidence.”

On Limiting the Playbook:

“Yeah, I think as an entire staff, we’ve challenged ourselves. Just because we ran it in fall camp doesn’t mean it’s a play that we have to carry into game one and we carried a little bit more of our menu in last year and this is a lot more condensed you know going into this this season of what we want to be able to execute a high level based on our opponent.”

On Adversity for Dante/QB’s:

“Yeah, all of it, right? Sudden change moments. We don’t know what that adversity will look like, so you prepare for all of it, right? You prepare for every one of those situations. We’re not saying we want to go create adversity, right? But we know that adversity will happen.”

On NFL Roster Cuts/Nikko Reed:

“Well, I think we were able to highlight some of that yesterday. Just as far as our players, I don’t know the exact number of how many we’ve had drafted since we’ve been here. But I think there’s only two of them that are on active rosters now when it comes to drafted guys. And guys like Nico, you’re thrilled to see them take advantage of an opportunity, right? Not necessarily care about how they got there, but recognizing they get the opportunity to get there.

And I’m not one bit surprised with him. He’s always been a great player. He operates like a vet. He’s had a really good, you know, fall camp, it looks like, from the outside looking in. So I think they recognize what they have in him. And there’s several of our players that have gotten opportunities and some that didn’t get an opportunity yesterday that are still going to have opportunities moving forward.

So those guys, that’s a great example of the ones that didn’t get it, you know, adversity setting in and, okay, what’s my plan? How am I going to attack it? And the guys that made it realizing, hey, this is for today and rent’s due again tomorrow. So we’re very excited about our guys that have done a great job in the NFL and the opportunities ahead of them.”

On Game One Goals:

“I just think always early in the season you see teams that don’t play clean you know I think we even saw in week zero games whether it’s penalties whether it’s poor tackling, your missed tackle rate is the highest it ever is at the beginning of the season. And i think last season even though the game didn’t
necessarily go at the way we wanted I think we walked away game one with one missed tackle right there were you know several teams that had several missed tackles early in the season. You see it all over tape early. So we have to tackle well and we have to play clean, right, efficiently from an operations standpoint, what personnel is on the field. No pre-snap or post-snap penalties.”

On Dante’s Growth:

“No I think he’s grown since the minute he’s been here right and he continues to operate like a like a pro. I wouldn’t say there’s anything this week that all of a sudden he turned on that hasn’t been in operation ever since this offseason and even coming into last season. I think he’s operated like that since he’s been here.”