Dan Lanning's Ducks still not ready for college football's primetime

The 6th-ranked Oregon Ducks started their 2026 campaign 1-0, but barely. They struggled to showcase their dominance from last season. The final score and state do not tell the story of the game. If week one tells the story of the 2026 Ducks, they will be lucky to make it to the Big Ten championship.

Oregon started the game off slow against an inferior opponent in Boise State. The Ducks did not score at all in the first quarter. They found themselves down 17-14 at halftime and were happy to still be in the game. Dante Moore did not look how he looked in the playoffs last season, and his receivers were not getting open either. A couple of times in the first half, they failed to convert on fourth down.

Boise State stuck around the entirety of the game and only got outscored 20-10 in the second half, but they had the national championship contenders on the ropes. This could very well just be the punch in the mouth Oregon needed to snap out of it, or this could be some foreshadowing of what is to come.

Dan Lanning addressed his team's performance after the game by saying, "We kind of gave them an opportunity, a chance to hang around," and that "There's a lot that we can do a lot better. This is almost kind of the flip side of the last time that we played Boise, where, in a lot of ways, we won in total yards and some situations, but we didn't really win the critical situations. They won some of those critical situations."

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How Oregon got ranked as high as they did is a mystery, and the preseason ranking system will remain a mystery for as long as it exists. Maybe it was the return of Dante Moore and Dakorien Moore. Their connection did not click until later on in the game, and some could even argue it was extremely underwhelming. The offense is full of weapons; there is no doubt about that, but when you play against an unranked team at home in a sold-out stadium and scratch by with a win, it raises concerns inside and outside the program.

Right now, this team is still not ready to take the next step. With this performance, it is vital that the Ducks don't overlook any opponent on the schedule. Oregon plays Oklahoma State on Saturday, September 12, which may be a closer game than expected. 

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