Trying to add a payment method? You can do this on the 
Welcome to The Rereadables, where we periodically revisit some favorite stories from the past, annotated with thoughts from the present.
With No. 6 Oregon facing No. 3 Penn State on Saturday, here’s the game story I originally filed well past midnight Dec. 7, 2024, from Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, after Oregon’s 45-37 win in the Big Ten championship game — the last time these two teams met.
Click the footnotes for my thoughts on how things look 10 months later.
Oregon Ducks avoid College Football Playoff drama with Big Ten dominance
James Franklin was far from upset about his team’s actual play.
Sure, his Penn State Nittany Lions had lost a game that, save for a few plays, could have been winnable. But after a 45-37 loss to the No. 1 Oregon Ducks in the Big Ten Championship game, the coach tried to give his opponent credit and segue into how proud he was of his team for competing.
The Oregon band had other ideas.
See, the postgame press conference situation here in Lucas Oil Stadium is a temporary thing. Reporters gathered in a large auxiliary room in the bowels of this Midwestern cathedral to ask questions of the coaches and players, sitting up at a long table positioned right up against a wall. Behind the wall is a walkway. And in that walkway was the Oregon band. And just as Franklin was gearing up, the band kicked in with a rousing rendition of “Mighty Oregon.”
The noise filled the press conference. The moderator asked Franklin to pause for a moment and let the band finish.
He wasn’t a fan.
“I have no issue with them celebrating,” Franklin said. “But this is kind of a JV setup.”1
The 52-year-old wasn’t wrong there, but if he had an issue with Oregon celebrating, well, it probably wouldn’t have mattered.
The Oregon Ducks have been members of the Big Ten Conference for five months now. And while the Ducks first showed up here to Indianapolis in July talking nice and acting quirky after plopping that giant inflatable Duck in the White River down the road, they returned this weekend as the only undefeated team in the country, as the best team in the country, and as the team that wasn’t going to wait for permission before it started taking what it saw as theirs.2
The game wasn’t easy on Saturday. There were times when Oregon’s athletes played in a class of their own, with Kenyon Sadiq hurdling opponents3, Tez Johnson juking guys out of their shoes and Jordan James doing his typical day’s work as a bulldozer. The Ducks never trailed and they scored touchdowns on their first three drives.
There were also times when Penn State looked every bit of the No. 3 team in the country, especially as the Lions attacked the Ducks along the edges and up the middle. Penn State rushed for 292 yards and two touchdowns. Penn State passed for 226 yards and three touchdowns. And the Lions were right in the thick of this thing until the fourth quarter when the Ducks ground out a 13-play, 75-yard scoring drive that ate up seven minutes of clock, then countered a follow-up Penn State touchdown and Oregon punt with a Nikko Reed interception on a deep shot with 1:54 to play.4
After Dillon Gabriel took a pair of knees, after the green and yellow confetti fell, after coach Dan Lanning and game MVP Johnson celebrated with the rest of the roster on a quickly constructed platform at the 20-yard line and after all the players received a copy of USA Today with the headline “Duck Walk” on the front page, Franklin’s postgame analysis began. And yes, the coach was disappointed. But he also found himself without a whole lot of words to explain what came next for the Lions.
Chaos has reigned in college football this week. Arizona State appears in. Boise State appears in. Clemson and SMU are both on the bubble after the Tigers’ upset over the Mustangs in the ACC title game. Had Penn State won on Saturday, the Lions would have been looking at a first-round bye.5
Now?
“We literally spent the entire week on Oregon. And for me to sit here and feel like I can understand or predict how those things are going to go when you got all those people in that room and all those personalities, I’m not sure,” Franklin said. “I’m fairly confident that we’re going to be in the playoffs. I can speak on that. And I know these guys and myself and the rest of the guys in the locker room will be excited about the opportunity that comes.
“Do I think our résumé matches up with anybody in the country? Yeah, I think it does.”6
Well, anyone except for the team celebrating down at the other end of the stadium. As Franklin spoke, two security guards stood outside the Oregon locker room and kept laughing. They never saw what was happening behind those doors, but they could certainly smell the same aroma that has wafted out of similarly successful rooms in Oregon history.
“Don’t know what that is,” one said, slyly. “Smells great though.”7
Soon, Gabriel, who threw three touchdown passes, Johnson, who caught 11 passes for 181 yards and a score, linebacker Bryce Boettcher and Lanning walked out of those doors, hopped on a golf cart and were whisked away to where Franklin and his Penn State players once stood. Lanning wore a smile and still had remnants of emotion in his eyes when he took his spot on the dais and actually obliged a question about the past.
“When you get to be a part of games like this, I think you start to think intrinsically about the journey you’ve been on and being there,” Lanning said. “But what brings me joy is the people that you love that get to enjoy the journey with you — these guys up here, Phil (Knight), my parents. For them to be part of a night like tonight, I know what that means to them. That means a lot more to me than any success that I ever have, them getting to be a part of that success.”8
Lanning quickly snapped out of the moment of reflection when the next question posed to him was about the future.
Can the Ducks win a national title?9
“I’ll be honest, this is the furthest thing from my mind right now,” he said. “I’m worried about tomorrow, I’m worried about the next day, the next play. I think that’s how you get there. If you start putting the end goal in sight — I don’t think it’s any secret what this team wants to accomplish — but you don’t get there by just looking at it. It takes work.”
The other thing Lanning isn’t worried about is getting in, or seeding, or having to get his roster ready for another game in two weeks. The winning took care of that.
It was the fourth-quarter comeback against Wisconsin10, the upset of Ohio State, taking care of business against Purdue and finally getting over that damn Washington hump that makes this next part so clear for the Ducks. They will be the No. 1 seed in the College Football Playoffs. They will get a first-round bye. They will be playing in the Rose Bowl on Jan. 1.
And if you believe Lanning, the Ducks will start getting a jump on that tomorrow. Which, technically, as he and the players left the press conference and made their way back to their locker room, was in the present. It was 12:47 a.m., the Ducks were Big Ten Champions, and there was still work to be done for the conference’s self-described keystone species.11
“You get an opportunity to invade a new environment somewhere maybe you didn’t belong and get the opportunity to take over that environment,” Lanning said. “We said this is the last step for us to become that. I’m really proud of our guys buying into that thought and building off of it.”
— Tyson Alger, The I-5 Corridor
- “This is a JV setup,” has become a part of my regular lexicon over the last nine months.
↩︎ - When Oregon’s season ended with the Rose Bowl disaster to Ohio State, it was easy to lose sight of this: Oregon’s first year after a program-defining move was pulled off to near perfection. The Ducks won nearly all their games. They made national headlines with their marketing. Their brand is significantly stronger than it was before joining the Big Ten, which wasn’t a given. Take a look at 0-3 UCLA, which just fired its coach.
↩︎ - “Some people come up to me, ‘Oh, you’re the guy who hurdled,’” Sadiq told me in July. “People knowing that I have the ability to do that, it’s a great thing, but it comes with a little expectation to keep performing to that level, which is fair.”
Sadiq has 3 touchdowns — and one hurdle — so far in 2025.
↩︎ - Penn State’s recipe for success on Saturday won’t stray too far from this ideal situation. In 2025, Penn State returns senior running backs Kaytron Allen (273 yards, 8.0 YPC, 3 TD in 2025) and Nicholas Singleton (179 yards, 4.4 YPC, 5 TD) and have looked far more dynamic on the ground than through the air. While Drew Allar returns for his senior season at quarterback, he has only four touchdown passes through three games, while the offense has only four plays this season that have gone for more than 30 yards. By comparison, Oregon’s offense has generated 11 (in one more game).
Franklin is looking to portal receivers Devonte Ross and Kyron Hudson to change that.
“The reality is, we’re going to need Devonte Ross to have a really good season and to have two or three games where everybody is talking about him,” Franklin said. “And we need Hudson to do the same thing. And what you hope is that you have multiple games where they’re doing it together and you have a few games where they’re doing it on their own.”
↩︎ - Clemson, Boise State and SMU made it. And boy did ASU make it: Former UO offensive coordinator Kenny Dillingham led the Sun Devils to a win over Iowa State in the Big 12 title game to secure a bye, then nearly knocked off Texas in the playoff quarterfinals. As for that bye Penn State lost out on? It might have been a blessing in disguise as all four teams with byes lost in the quarterfinals — including Boise State, which the Nittany Lions knocked off 31-14 in the Fiesta Bowl.
↩︎ - Franklin wasn’t talking out of turn. Penn State smoked SMU in the first round, breezed past Boise State in the quarterfinals and came a last-play Notre Dame field goal short from reaching the national championship.
↩︎ - I’ll never forget walking into the Rose Bowl locker room after the Ducks beat Florida State in 2015 and it just wafting with smoke. Same after the Wisconsin Rose Bowl in 2020. One of these years I want to write a story about who is responsible for smuggling in the cigars. What happens to them if they lose?
↩︎ - I’m glad Lanning took this moment. For much of 2024, Oregon’s motto was “job’s not finished,” which happens when a team’s overall goal is a national championship. But in this title-or-bust era the Ducks are in, I still think it’s important to note the significant accomplishments and moments along the way. It’s not like they got the opportunity after the Rose Bowl.
↩︎ - I believed it when I wrote that. The rush defense against Penn State was concerning, but this was an Oregon defense that limited opponents to fewer than 20 points nine times in the season. It was an Oregon offense that put up 35-plus eight times. This game, which Oregon still won, was the outlier. Three weeks later, Ohio State put up 500 yards of total offense in beating Oregon 41-21.
↩︎ - Penn State is the only game on Oregon’s schedule, right?
That’s what it felt like coming into the year. No Ohio State. No Michigan. None of the Big Ten’s Blue Bloods. But when you look back at 2024, some of the season’s best moments came in the nonmarquee games — such as the trip out to Madison where the Ducks’ perfect regular season wouldn’t have survived without a monster performance from defensive end Matayo Uiagalalei. That 16-13 win may just feel like a highlight now, but there were real stakes and real drama. It was unexpected and the Ducks persevered. It’s one of those things that make college football great.
So yes, Penn State on Saturday is the marquee game. But bring on Iowa, USC, Minnesota, Washington, Indiana and, yes, even Rutgers.
↩︎ - Lanning began using the “keystone species” phrase in fall camp.
“That means that we were meant to be here,” Oregon linebacker Jeffrey Bassa said. “That means we’re the top of this conference.”
And I’m now reminded of just how much a climb the football season is. Go back and watch all of last season’s Ducks vs. Them episodes and think of the amount of time just goes into messaging and motivation. Then comes practice. Then comes film. Then comes travel. The come the expectations.
I’ve covered some really good Oregon teams in my 12 years on the beat. But I’ve never covered an Oregon team that’s been able to match the climb after a program-defining year. The 2015 Ducks fell far short of the 2014 Ducks. The 2020 Ducks lost more times (3) in seven games than the 2019 Ducks did (2) in 14.
It’s hard to be this good for this long — the Ducks haven’t lost a regular season conference game since Oct. 2023. But it’s the challenge players like Uiagalelei have signed up for.
“The same work you put in is there, but you just treat it as a new mountain,” Uiagalelei said. “Like, thinking about last year, blah, blah, blah, like, that’s last year. I’m over that. The work you put in, the new techniques you learned, that’s still going to be there to reinforce that, but that’s just part of the new mountain.”
↩︎
