EUGENE, Ore. — Dan Lanning entered the post-game news conference with a sweeping smile.
“Anybody got a heart-rate monitor?” he quipped.
Lanning is all of us, every single one of us who adores college football and witnessed on Saturday what makes the game so incredibly great: tight wins and big brands, passion and pageantry, upsets and underdogs. Heart racing. Pulse pounding.
Four top-25 teams won in overtime, two teams won by two points and one won by a point.
Perhaps none of them was wilder than what unfolded here in the Pacific Northwest inside a roaring and rocking Autzen Stadium.
On this field, two of college football’s most expensive teams waged war — each estimated to have spent close to $20 million on their rosters. Two big Big Ten brands battled. A haymaker here. An uppercut there.
Eight combined touchdowns. Nearly 1,000 yards of offense. Seven lead changes.
Great catches. Wild runs. Big hits.
Wacky happenings, too. An ejection for spitting! A second-quarter onside kick ricocheting off a player. Questionable game-ending decisions. A costly late-game offensive penalty.
And, in the end, a classic for the ages: No. 3 Oregon 32, No. 2 Ohio State 31.
“You don’t get too many of these,” says Oregon receiver Tez Johnson. “You dream of playing games like this.”
A dream, that’s what it felt like. A college football dream. An epic showdown that delivered. Lanning described it as a heavyweight fight that went every round.
His Oregon Ducks landed the final blow. A defensive stop that left the opposing quarterback laying on the turf. The clock at zeroes. And the fans streaming across the field. It was sheer madness. Shirtless students. A crowd-surfing mascot. Even those up in age. A man using a cane weaved through the crowd, “This makes me feel young!”
And there among them, in the madness, a hero trekked across the field: transfer quarterback Dillon Gabriel, minutes removed from a 373-yard, three-touchdown performance, a nationally televised prime-time outing that just may usher him into the Heisman Trophy conversation and has put the Ducks squarely in the title hunt.
In front of a rollicking record crowd here, the Ducks snatched away victory from the Buckeyes in a game representative of their Big Ten move: a clash against the biggest of brands in front of a national audience in prime time.
This is why you join the Big Ten.
It ended in stunning fashion: The best athlete on the football field was called for a costly penalty. With Ohio State driving for a game-winning field goal, Jeremiah Smith, the Buckeyes’ uber-talented freshman receiver, shoved aside a defensive back for a reception inside the Oregon 30-yard line. Flags flew: offensive pass interference. It backed up the Buckeyes out of field goal range with 20 seconds on the clock.
Coach Ryan Day decided against using a timeout. As time ticked down, quarterback Will Howard threw incomplete to then set up the final play. With six seconds on the clock, Howard dropped back for a pass, felt pressure and sprinted out of the pocket. Inexplicably, he tucked the ball, ran and slid down as the clock hit zeroes.
Fans poured onto the playing surface. The Buckeyes sulked off. And Oregon had a signature victory over the powerhouse of its new conference — the most significant validation yet for what Lanning has built here in Eugene. The Nike-backed NIL effort, a cool college town, a young, risk-taking coach.
Lanning pulled a surprise in the second quarter, calling an onside kick that ricocheted off an Oregon player and was recovered by the Ducks (it led to a field goal — the ultimate difference in the game).
Afterward, the 38-year-old coach breathed heavy. Many emotions ran through him. The strongest of them? “Relief,” he said.
Breathe easy. Halfway through the season, the 6-0 Ducks are now in the driver’s seat for the Big Ten title having passed what will be their toughest test of the regular season. The rest of the way, there’s no Penn State or unbeaten Indiana. However, a road game at the Big House looms.
This isn’t the time to talk about that, of course. It’s time to discuss an epic Saturday in college football. Seven top-25 teams either won in overtime, by two points or by one point. No. 13 LSU, No. 4 Penn State, No. 23 Illinois and No. 8 Tennessee all survived in overtime. No. 22 Pitt and No. 7 Alabama each won by two points.
And then there were the third-ranked Ducks and their one-point victory in front of a most electric environment on a perfect day for football. A record crowd of 60,129 saw this one. And they sounded like 100,000.
Lanning, who wears a one-eared headset, needed to cover his open ear to hear at times. “That a good thing,” he said.
They sang, danced and swayed. Finally, they stormed, leaping over barriers to reach the playing surface and embrace their heroes — one in particular, Gabriel.
“A lot of F-bombs,” the quarterback said of the aftermath. “Clock strikes zero and you just enjoy it.”
He shredded the Buckeyes, completing 23 of 44 passes and tossing some of the most beautiful long balls you’ll see. Ohio State entered having not allowed a pass of 30 yards or more. Gabriel and his receivers had four of those.
Johnson caught a 48-yarder. Evan Stewart caught one for 69. Two more receivers each caught 32-yard passes.
“Bombs away,” Johnson said.
“We were going to give them a show,” Stewart said.
Boy, did they. A 496-yard show with seven third- or fourth-down conversions, a 100-yard rusher (Jordan James, who runs like he’s “pissed,” said his coach) and an offensive line that pushed around their opponent.
In the pregame locker room, Lanning delivered to his team a message: Leave it on the field. Give me everything you got.
There was one more message, too.
Said Lanning: “You can sleep when you die.”
