Oregon HC Dan Lanning Talks Dante Moore, CFB’s Future & More with Rich

Dan Lanning knows exactly how loud it has gotten around his quarterback, and he says Dante Moore stopped listening a while ago.

"He's one of the most humble people I know," Lanning told Rich of Moore, whose name keeps getting bandied about as a possible first overall pick. "He realized that he's in charge of his performance. It has nothing to do with the media. It has nothing to do with the praise, or lack thereof at times."

The attention is deserved, Lanning said, and earned. What sold him this offseason was not the highlight throws. "Sometimes the best play he can make is an incompletion," he said of a quarterback now comfortable getting the ball back to the line of scrimmage for another snap. The pre-snap and post-snap reads are a level up, as is the willingness to burn a ball rather than force one.

Moore has also built himself a phone list. Peyton Manning, Bo Nix, Marcus Mariota, Cam Newton. Lanning isn't on those calls, but he noted that some of the Manning conversations happened before Moore decided to come back, because Manning was a useful example of someone who had made a similar choice. "This guy is yearning for knowledge."

Asked what still needs polishing, Lanning noted that answering hands clues to the defensive coaches he'll face, which had Rich asking if he was being accused of scouting for Michigan ahead of that November 14 visit to Eugene. "Does the shoe fit, Rich?"

The bigger fight Lanning keeps picking has nothing to do with his roster. He wants the season over by January 1. "It's really hard to put the toothpaste back in the tube," he said of the current economics, but the calendar is the lever he thinks actually moves. A portal that opens mid-season creates a market nobody can track and entices players to leave for more money.

His fix is structural. Start in week zero, move the conference championship games up, then play the playoff on consecutive Saturdays the way the NFL does. Oregon went 25 days between the Big Ten title game in early December and its Rose Bowl. "I just think the format could be much better," Lanning said. "That's not the way anybody else does playoffs."

What he hears back is TV money, plus the reality that the NFL has claimed December Saturdays. "We're like the minor league system for the NFL, and it doesn't seem like they bend over backwards to help us out at all," he said. If revenue is the obstacle, his answer is to make more of it by expanding, even to 24 teams, and let the sport feel more like March Madness.

Rich also wanted to know whether Bo Nix had to get Justin Herbert's blessing to wear number 10. Lanning sidestepped that one and offered a better story instead. Dillon Gabriel wanted number 8, so Gabriel called Marcus Mariota himself and asked. "That I can't take any credit for," Lanning said. "That's him thinking ahead." Players, he added, carry more awareness about that than coaches do. His own plan is to retire 53 and 47, then retire whatever numbers nobody wants anyway.

Then things got expensive. Oregon's Jordan collection came up, Rich went fishing for a spare size 13, and Lanning noted that 13 happens to be his size too. The room turned it into a trade: Oregon goes on the banner, something else comes off. TJ, who grew up 40 minutes from State College, gave up Penn State on the spot.

Lanning's parting instruction: don't shelve them. "You got to rock those things."