In this season of failures and fizzles, frauds and faceplants, one team still found a way to stand out for its futility.
Look out below!
Here comes Dan Lanning with a bellyflop off the high dive.
Splash!
Oregon is college football’s biggest flop of all.
Six top-15 teams lost this weekend. Lanning’s Ducks weren’t among them, because they’d already dropped out of the top 15. Then, they spun out of the Top 25, and now they’ve found a new rock bottom of the Lanning era.
It looks like this:
Illinois 21, Oregon 10.
Yipes.
The toast of the summer became the afterthought of autumn.
Preseason No. 2 became a midseason P-U.
Oregon stinks.
so does Michigan's offense
The previously hapless Illini turned the Ducks into mincemeat, and the saddest part for Oregon is, it barely registered as a surprise. In fact, it barely registered at all.
Brigham Young, Mississippi, Texas Tech and Tennessee losing became bigger stories, because everyone stopped taking Oregon seriously weeks ago.
Still, it can always get worse. And, it did.
You can forget those national championship aspirations Lanning spoke of before the season. You can forget the playoff, too. Oregon’s got work to do just to make a bowl game.
What if I told you the old brains of Oregon’s operation now coaches Kentucky?
Maybe, Will Stein was always the coaching star, not Lanning.
You might be ready to believe that, considering Oregon became an egregious fraud, and its production cratered, in its first season since Stein stopped calling the shots on offense.
Kentucky is very much in the hunt for a playoff bid in Stein’s first season coaching the Wildcats.
Oregon is very much in the hunt for a Pinstripe Bowl bid.
That just about says it all, doesn’t it?
Stein proved himself as a quarterback whisperer in his three seasons heading up Oregon’s offense for Lanning. He’s gone, and there’s no more whispering, just Oregon fans shouting into the void, while Illinois applied a backhoe’s worth of dirt on the grave of Oregon’s season.
Let’s insert the necessary caveats: Oregon has been without its starting quarterback since Dante Moore’s Week 4 head injury. And, the Ducks played this game without a few of their top receivers.
Let’s also tell the truth: Moore’s injury is an insufficient excuse for Oregon’s fizzle.
The Ducks were already grounded before Moore’s injury. They lost to Oklahoma State with Moore in the lineup, and they nearly lost to Boise State, too.
Then Moore got hurt, and the losses kept coming.
Drew Mehringer, Lanning’s choice to replace Stein as offensive coordinator, might not last the season.
Does Lanning need a new play-caller after Oregon failed to solve an Illinois defense that ranks among the Big Ten’s worst?
“All things are on the table for us,” Lanning said after this loss.
All things, except a head coaching change.
Lanning’s job isn’t in jeopardy. His .841 winning percentage wraps him in a blanket of protection, but despite all those Lanning victories, Oregon is getting insufficient return on investment, especially this season.
While we were focused on Arch Manning and Texas losing twice in a row with a roster of blue-chippers bought by a war chest, Oregon stormed in and said, Hold my beer. We’ll show you what a real waste of money looks like.
Used to be, Lanning just lost the big games. Now, Oregon doesn’t have any big games left, because its season has slipped into irrelevance.
In Lanning’s best season, in 2024, he delivered a Big Ten title. Then, his Ducks got pasted by Ohio State in the playoff quarterfinals. Lanning served up his first career playoff victory last season, but Indiana turned Oregon into dust in the semifinals.
Turns out, those were glory days. At least those teams made the playoff, thanks in part to Stein’s quarterback development skills.
Lanning failed to adequately address Stein’s departure. Rather than make an outside hire for the coordinator position, he promoted Mehringer, who’d been Oregon’s tight ends coach. He should’ve stuck to that.
Prominent Ducks pundit Geoff Schwartz, a former Oregon offensive lineman turned sports media personality, eviscerated the offense in a postgame social media post that brought words to the emotions every Ducks fan must be feeling.
“It’s gross,” Schwartz said of the offense.
He described the play-calling as “complete sabotage.”
“I can’t watch this offense anymore,” Schwartz wrote.
Every critique of Mehringer and his offense is valid. Just don’t spare Lanning from the blame game. Against Illinois, he twice opted for long field goals instead of going for 4th-and-medium.
Both field goals missed, including one miss from 53 yards on 4th-and-7 with Oregon trailing by four points with about six minutes to go.
Later, Oregon trailed by 11 with about a minute to play, and Lanning sent out the field-goal unit on third down. That kick missed, too.
Lanning used to take pride in his fourth-down aggressiveness. Now, Oregon is a portrait in passiveness.
Oregon needs some brains to emerge in this operation.
Or, did all wit depart when Stein left for Kentucky?
More contenders for college football’s biggest flop of 2026 season
- Texas A&M (4-4): The Aggies need to move on from Marcel Reed. The bigger long-term question: Is Mike Elko the right coach for Texas A&M? One year after making the playoff, the Aggies shifted back into the fraud lane they know so well.
- Michigan (4-3): Michigan’s offense stinks worse than it did under Sherrone Moore. And, no, Kyle Whittingham, you don’t get any kudos for playing Indiana close. More losses are coming, too, in what’s become a sour debut for Whittingham.
- Southern Cal (6-2): If Lincoln Riley’s offense can only muster seven points against Wisconsin, then there’s not much point in employing Riley.
- Oklahoma (4-3): I’d be lying if I said I ever believed in this Sooners team, but somebody believed in them enough to rank them preseason No. 9. Apparently, those voters didn’t properly research Oklahoma’s offense.
- Penn State (3-4): Matt Campbell’s first season will be worse than James Franklin’s last, prolonging Penn State’s residency in Flop-ville.
Blake Toppmeyer is the USA TODAY Network's senior national college football columnist. Listen to his podcast, "College Football Unfiltered." Email him at BToppmeyer@gannett.com and follow him on X @btoppmeyer.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Oregon is college football’s biggest fraud. Dan Lanning owns this mess | Opinion
