Through seven fall camp practices, Oregon’s player-led culture is becoming easier to see, not in speeches or slogans, but in who teaches, who corrects and who brings someone else along.
Seven practices into Oregon’s fall camp, I am becoming less interested in hearing this described as Dan Lanning’s most player-led team and more interested in watching what that actually looks like.
There have been enough practices now for some of the opening-week energy to wear off. Players are tired, the installation has grown and position battles are moving closer to producing actual consequences. Younger players are being asked to process more football at the same time their bodies are beginning to feel August, and veterans who already understand the expectations are being asked to help somebody else reach them.
Lanning acknowledged that change this week when he talked about fatigue beginning to set in during Oregon’s second consecutive day of practice. What he liked was watching players continue to push through it, particularly when somebody could make a mistake one day and correct it the next. When the conversation returned to his desire to create more “alphas” within the roster, Lanning described leadership as an everyday process rather than something Oregon completed during the offseason.
That has become one of the more interesting things I have watched during these first seven practices. The strongest evidence of a player-led team has rarely involved somebody standing in front of everyone and delivering a speech. More often, it has been one player recognizing what somebody beside him needs and doing something about it.
“Who’d you bring with you?” is beginning to look less like a question
After Oregon’s first practice, Lanning was asked about the player-led quality of this roster. His response included what has become one of my favorite questions of camp: “You were able to make it. Who’d you bring with you?”
There is quite a bit packed into that idea. Oregon recruits enough talent that plenty of players can survive the physical demands of a practice. The next stage is whether those players understand the program well enough, and care enough about what happens around them, to make somebody else better too.
Seven practices later, examples are beginning to appear throughout the roster.
Iapani “Poncho” Laloulu is already the established center and one of the most decorated players on the team, but A’lique Terry has been just as interested in what Laloulu is doing with the young linemen around him. He is speaking up during practice, taking freshmen under his wing and investing in players such as Tommy Tofi and Immanuel Iheanacho rather than spending his final college season narrowly focused on himself. Terry put it pretty plainly when he said Laloulu “could easily just be his own, doing his own thing,” but instead has taken responsibility for leading the room.
That matters even more because the offensive line is still dealing with real competition. Dave Iuli can praise another lineman for playing well even though every strong performance by someone else makes Terry’s eventual decisions more difficult. Terry has described this as one of the more connected offensive-line groups he has had at Oregon, but the connection is existing alongside a competition where only five players will ultimately start.
That is a much more meaningful test of leadership than everyone getting along in June.
Oregon’s standard is starting to move horizontally
The clearest change I see is not that Oregon’s coaches are becoming less involved. It is that more information seems capable of moving sideways through the roster instead of always having to travel downward from a coach.
Dante Moore provides one example. Drew Mehringer has talked about the starting quarterback attending meetings that are largely designed for younger players and making sure those players are there. Terry has also listened to Moore and Laloulu discuss the offense beyond the boundaries of quarterback and center, with Laloulu understanding responsibilities belonging to receivers and running backs and Moore increasingly operating like someone responsible for the larger picture.
Jamari Johnson may provide an even cleaner example of what Lanning wants. Lanning has watched Johnson correct teammates when routes are not run correctly, but the important part of his explanation was why Johnson can get away with doing it. He has built relationships with the players he is correcting, which gives the correction credibility rather than making it feel like one player trying to establish superiority over another.
Marcus Dixon described the same thing from inside the tight end room at Media Day. “There’s not a day where he’s not coaching somebody,” Dixon said before reaching the conclusion himself: “That’s a player-led team.”
The running backs may offer the best illustration because the transfer has happened so quickly. A year ago, Jordon Davison and Dierre Hill Jr. were freshmen being taught what Oregon football was supposed to look like. Now Ra’Shaad Samples says they can echo his coaching points and philosophies to Tradarian Ball and Brandon Smith because their own transition from high school football is still fresh enough that they understand exactly what those freshmen are experiencing.
Hill’s football knowledge has developed enough that Samples has talked about him helping other players get aligned in different formations. Davison has described the responsibility in even simpler terms, talking about older players helping him and his obligation to pay some of that forward.
That is where “player-led” starts becoming more useful than a slogan. The coach teaches something to a player, but the information does not stop there. Eventually the player becomes capable of teaching it to somebody else.
There is a leadership idea that helps explain what Oregon is building
Watching that happen through seven practices brought me back to a leadership idea that is nearly a century old.
Management thinker Mary Parker Follett distinguished between what she called power-over and power-with. Power-over is the traditional idea that authority flows from one person’s ability to direct another. Power-with is different. It is jointly developed, with people using their different abilities and responsibilities to act together rather than depending completely upon control from above.
Football obviously cannot eliminate hierarchy. Lanning is the head coach. Terry decides who plays on the offensive line. Chris Hampton determines what his defense installs. Samples establishes expectations for the running backs, and none of Oregon’s players gets an equal vote on who starts against Oklahoma State.
That is not what power-with means.
The distinction is what happens after the leader establishes the expectation. Does everybody remain dependent upon the coach to enforce it, or does the group eventually develop enough ownership that players begin reinforcing the standard themselves?
A coach can tell a freshman exactly how Oregon expects him to prepare, while Laloulu can demonstrate it every day and explain what the freshman did not understand. A coach can correct an alignment, while Hill can recognize the problem before the snap and help somebody else get into the right place. Terry can preach connection within a competitive room, but Iuli praising a player who may be competing for the same repetitions makes that expectation real in a different way.
That is power-with in a football context. The authority does not disappear. Its reach expands.
There is a performance reason to want players carrying more of the load
This is also where the organizational-performance part becomes more than an interesting leadership analogy.
Research on shared leadership has repeatedly found a positive relationship with team effectiveness. One large meta-analysis examined 42 independent samples and found that shared leadership had a positive overall relationship with effectiveness, with particularly meaningful effects on team attitudes, behavioral processes and the internal states that help groups function. The researchers also found that shared leadership had effects beyond traditional vertical leadership and tended to become more valuable as the work became more complex.
Football qualifies as complex work.
A coaching staff can build the scheme, teach the technique and establish the expectations, but it cannot personally manufacture urgency for more than 100 players every hour of every day. Coaches cannot enter every huddle, catch every bad habit before it becomes established or stand beside every freshman when his legs are tired and he is struggling to remember an adjustment during the seventh practice of camp.
That is why I keep returning to the idea of the standard becoming portable.
Chris Hampton has already talked about Oregon’s player-run work helping the defense enter camp with enough knowledge to carry substantially more installation. That matters schematically because the Ducks can spend August refining and testing concepts rather than introducing everything from zero. It matters culturally because the learning did not stop simply because the coaches were not standing in front of the players.
A genuinely player-led organization should be capable of functioning when the formal leader is not physically present. Otherwise, it is not really player-led. It is simply well supervised.
Competition is where “power with” gets considerably harder
The next stage will be much more revealing because Oregon is approaching the point where competition produces winners and losers.
That is especially obvious along the offensive line. Terry wants enough good players that deciding on five becomes difficult, and he has repeatedly encouraged the group to make his job as hard as possible. Eventually, though, the “gluing” process he has discussed will begin, combinations will become more stable and somebody who believed he had a chance to start will discover that another player has moved ahead.
The same thing will happen everywhere else. A receiver will get fewer snaps than he wants. A talented defensive lineman will discover there are several other talented defensive linemen standing between him and a larger role. Running backs who genuinely like one another will eventually have to watch somebody else receive a carry they wanted.
That is when the player-led culture becomes much harder to fake.
Oregon has consistently talked about competition without fracture. The offensive line wants the best five. The defensive backs have praised one another while competing for snaps. Hill and Davison have talked about helping each other while both knowing there is only one football available on any particular play.
The coaches can create a meritocracy and explain how they want players to react to it. The locker room has to decide whether it can actually live inside one.
That is where power-with becomes more difficult than power-over. A coach can always use playing time to demand compliance. Creating an environment where the player who just lost a competition remains invested enough to help the teammate who won it requires something deeper.
The first scrimmage should put more pressure on all of it
Oregon’s first scrimmage arrives at a useful point because the Ducks are moving from understanding what they are supposed to do toward proving they can execute it under more realistic conditions.
Lanning has talked about how thud practices can provide a false sense of tackling because defenders never completely finish the play. Once Oregon begins taking players to the ground, the staff gets a much clearer answer about who can tackle, who can break tackles and which parts of practice actually survive when football becomes more physical.
The leadership test operates similarly.
It is relatively easy to help a freshman when everybody feels good. What happens after he makes the same mistake for the third time? It is easy to celebrate competition while everybody still believes he may win it. What happens once the depth chart begins creating separation?
Seven practices have given us evidence of what Oregon wants to become, but they have not yet provided the hardest circumstances in which that culture will have to operate. Those come later, through injuries, lost jobs, bad practices, close games and the inevitable stretches of a season when something does not happen the way players expected.
Seven practices have at least shown us where to look
That is why I am not ready to declare that Oregon has somehow solved the complicated problem of building a player-led culture. August is too early for that, and the easiest version of almost every culture exists before anybody has experienced disappointment.
What seven practices have done is give us a better idea of what to watch.
Look at who teaches when a coach is talking to somebody else. Look at who corrects a teammate and whether the teammate accepts it. Watch whether veteran players invest in freshmen whose development may eventually cost somebody else playing time, and whether competition creates better football without creating isolated players.
Those things are already appearing across different parts of Oregon’s roster, from Laloulu and Moore to Johnson, Hill, Davison and others beginning to assume more responsibility for what happens around them.
Lanning still establishes the standard, and his coaches remain responsible for teaching and enforcing it. Nothing about a player-led culture changes that.
The more interesting development through seven practices is that the standard increasingly appears capable of surviving once it leaves their hands.
That may ultimately be the difference between power over and power with at Oregon. One can make players do what the program asks while the coaches are watching. The other can help create a team capable of holding itself to the same expectation when they are not.