Sports can imitate life a lot of the time. You can learn some powerful lessons by playing sports, writing about sports or just casually watching sports. The life lessons are there to be seen if you just look for them.
The Oregon Ducks football team and the staff are learning some powerful lessons right now after the 39-31 loss at Oklahoma State. One of those lessons is making mistakes, learning from them, and making sure they don't happen again.
Oregon made plenty of mistakes in that loss, and none bigger than some fourth-down decisions. None of them worked — Oregon is 0-for-6 on 4th down conversions this year — and it ultimately cost the Ducks a game they should have won rather easily. The coaching staff is mentally working its way through that particular
lesson right now, including head coach Dan Lanning.
One of the more egregious errors was going for it on a 4th-and-8 on their own 33-yard line with a little under seven minutes to go, and it was still a one-score game. It was a mistake that could haunt the Ducks moving forward this year, if they let it. After the fact, Lanning admits that he wishes he'd made a different decision when asked if he regrets the call.
"Absolutely. It's always easy to go back and say after the fact," Lanning said. "I wish we were able to create a more fourth-down-advantageous play before the bad decision, and the numbers might say, 'Hey, that's the right decision.' It's the wrong decision; it didn't work.
"We were punting really well all day. What we weren't doing was stopping the other team we were playing all day; they would have probably been more fourth-down advantageous to go for it on their side of the ball if we did flip the field, and then ultimately, why you go for it on fourth is what happened. They end up kicking a field goal. You're down one touchdown and a two-point conversion, and you still have a chance to go win the game in two minutes if we don't fumble the ball. But did that work out good? No, absolutely not. Wrong decision on my part."
Right now, Oregon has an even bigger decision laid out before it: to let one early-season loss define their entire year or to learn from it and use it as motivation to make sure this can be a catalyst for something bigger. We'll see what the Ducks choose in the coming weeks.
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This article originally appeared on Ducks Wire: Dan Lanning feels 'regret' after 4th down decision vs. Oklahoma State
