Oregon Football’s Unique Culture Is Fueling Its Success

Dan Lanning’s Ducks are following a familiar blueprint, but they’re building something completely different in Eugene.

Whenever a coach leaves a job to take over a new program, there are bits and pieces that he borrows. Maybe a coordinator here or a support staffer there. Perhaps he borrows practice blueprints and various organizational strategies. But how to affect players and get the best out of them is something that can be far more difficult to grasp. You can recruit at the approximate level of the best teams in the sport, but can you get them to actually perform? It’s the great mystery of team sports, especially with a bunch of 18- to 22-year-olds.

There’s a list a mile long of coaches hired off a coaching tree who aren’t able to replicate the success of their former bosses. You don’t have to think long to arrive at your favorite failed knockoff version of Nick Saban, who is himself a product of the Bill Belichick tree, which has produced similarly spoiled fruit. Whenever any coach is hired from a tree, fans focus on how close the on-field product develops in the Saban mold. But some of Saban’s most important work has been around the mental aspect of the game. The same can be said of Kirby Smart, and now Oregon coach Dan Lanning, who worked for both of them along the way to Eugene. In Athens, Lanning met Drew Brannon and Cory Shaffer of AMPLOS, a performance psychology firm that has worked with Clemson and Georgia, among various other corporate clients. The word is Latin for growth and development, and it’s the growth mindset preached that is a key foundation of how the Ducks have built success.

“You hear coaches say it all the time the game is 90% mental 10% physical, and I would say as a football coach, you always lean toward the physical, and that really becomes more than 90% of what you do,” Lanning says. “What I was able to learn from Drew and Cory, working with those guys, is how you can actually go attack the mental just as much as the physical, whether it be from a messaging standpoint, or you know, just understand how to how to connect with a guy and relate to a guy to get the result that you want.”

Oregon head coach Dan Lanning maps out a “message” to relay to the Ducks every week :: Darren Yamashita/USA TODAY Sports

Brannon, who received a psychology doctorate from Georgia, grew up going to Tennessee football games. He played basketball at Presbyterian College, and it was there during his freshman year that he began to experience performance anxiety. His palms would start to sweat when he checked into games. His mind would race, and his heart would beat out of his chest. In his own words, he was “a disaster,” and he went about trying to fix himself. He discovered performance psychology and is now a partner at the firm. About a third of AMPLOS’s work is in sports, and in 2019 he began working with the Georgia football program, where he met Lanning as a young assistant.

The night we burned the boats! @CoachDanLanning pic.twitter.com/idqEGJTCVf

— Dr. Drew Brannon (@drbrannon) January 11, 2022

Brannon still works with the Dawgs, and you don’t need to look back much further than a few weeks ago to see the direct result of his work as consultant to the program. Down 14–3 at halftime to South Carolina, Georgia looked like a shell of the dominant 2021 and ’22 championship teams. It went into halftime, and there was no panic. Instead, there was a message delivered that cameras caught Smart relaying to his team: Win the moment.

“If you’ve ever been in a locker room during halftime, there's a lot going on in there, and so I just kind of grabbed [Smart] in a quick moment to give him a couple of thoughts because when you come in for halftime and everyone’s kind of meeting, offense, defense, making adjustments, doing their thing,” Brannon says. “And then he calls everybody up just like all coaches do. For kind of a couple of quick things before we go in the field again. So I just kind of gave him a couple thoughts and suggestions for worthwhile things to focus on in that message.”

The message came from Brannon that day, but it was a callback to the summer, when UGA spent 10 days focusing on building an understanding of a one-day-at-a-time attitude. Much like a new offense is installed in a summer, so are plans like this to instill a mentality into a team so that halftime of a conference game isn’t the first time the team has heard a certain message.

Lanning sits with Shaffer and maps out what he thinks the message will be each week of the season. He takes into account the opponent, where the game is and various other factors to strike the right note. During game weeks, they touch base on Mondays. But how do you make sure you’re crafting the right message for 100 young men? The first thing is making sure the message is owned by everyone in leadership positions, not just the head coach, so that players hear the same message from as many sources as possible throughout the week. Keep things concise and drill it home throughout the week. The biggest thing for Lanning is listening.

“Everybody in the world wants to talk, and not very many people want to listen,” Lanning says. “You have to give your players opportunities and moments to speak, whether it’s meeting with a small group, a leadership group, or if it’s just giving them an opportunity to address the team, which is something that we’ve done a lot more of this year than in the past. And when you listen, you’ll generally hear what message you need to hear. And it might be the wrong message, right? But at least gives you an opportunity to say, ‘O.K., that’s not the way I see it.’ Right. Let’s figure out how we can address that and make sure we’re all on the same page.”

Lanning also tries to listen as much as his players do when he doesn’t have the floor. Shaffer says whenever he’s in front of the team or the staff, Lanning has his iPad out taking notes. When Lanning first arrived at Oregon, he went about trying to create new traits in his program’s DNA that were unique to Oregon. He asked each player what the team’s greatest strengths and weaknesses were. What he learned was that the most common answer for both were connection and brotherhood. He found it interesting that many on the team knew what they needed but were confused about whether they accomplished it. They adopted what Lanning has referred to as a growth mindset.

But to develop a unique identity true to Oregon, Shaffer and Lanning went to work reading up on the corporation founded by Oregon’s most famous booster, Phil Knight. Shaffer, admittedly a sneakerhead, also watched the movie Air, which tells the story of how Nike courted Michael Jordan and became a global brand. And they crafted offseason content around the principles of Nike, which are shown throughout the movie.

“So let’s talk about how some of these principles can apply to us within a football program 50 years later,” Shaffer says. “So that was really cool, because not only did they get to learn a little bit more about Nike, but they got to talk about how well these principles apply to us.”

Lanning has taken that notion about Oregon as the flashy Nike University with the dizzying amount of uniform combinations and turned it on its head, casting his Ducks as innovators that do rare things to be successful no matter how they look.

“Dan and I discussed that openly because I think that was important for us to acknowledge and, you know, he was quick to remind me—which I think, speaks to the relationship that he and I have developed—but it’s just like, I don’t care if that’s kind of what other people think,” Shaffer says. “The message that our guys are gonna get is this. I understand that the perception of Oregon is one thing and like yeah, it is like Nike U and innovation—all the uniforms and this and that, that’s fine. But again, that’s all just such surface-level stuff. And what we’re going to be about within the program within these walls are going to be these things.”

Look no further than the Colorado game, where the team wearing color-changing cleats was cast as blue collar by its head coach. That week Lanning talked about how the Ducks were rooted in substance. He told it to his team all week, including in a Friday night team meeting and in the now-famous pregame speech Saturday morning in which he reiterated to his team that they were focused on what mattered, whereas Colorado wasn’t.

When you watch Oregon’s cinematic recaps, they often feature Lanning’s Friday night team talk, which drives home the point of the week. After beating Colorado, the next game was Stanford, for which the Friday night talk centered on the concept of the 20-mile mark. It’s derived from the author Jim Collins from the book Great by Choice, which Shaffer read recently. It was a theme of the offseason in which Oregon tried to find a way to go from being merely a good program to being a great one. In theory, the idea is simple: If you wanted to walk across the country, you’d do 20 miles a day. You’d do 20 miles whether it’s 100 degrees out or whether it’s freezing. You’d do 20 miles whether you were feeling your best or your worst. As Lanning said in the Stanford cinematic recap:

“You talk about highs and lows in football games, you talk about highs and lows in the season,” Lanning said. “Does it matter how emotional a game is? No, it doesn’t matter. The reality is we gotta march 20 miles today. The last thing we wanna do is go into this game, and we get five miles better when we should be getting 20 miles better.”

Dan Lanning’s Ducks are building something in Eugene following a blueprint adapted from two-time defending champs using the same organization that contributed to UGA’s success. If they follow a consistent process, they may just meet those Bulldogs … but they have many marches left to get there.