There are moments in a football season when patience is discipline, when the noise outside the building becomes louder than the problems inside of it and the best thing a head coach can do is refuse to react. There are other moments when patience begins to look less like conviction and more like stubbornness, when the evidence keeps arriving in different forms until ignoring it becomes its own decision. Oregon reached that second place Saturday afternoon in Illinois, and by Sunday, Dan Lanning acted.
The Ducks ended Drew Mehringer’s brief tenure as Oregon’s offensive coordinator after a 21-10 loss dropped Oregon to 4-3. The timing will surprise some people because seven games is an extraordinarily short evaluation window, particularly for a first-year coordinator dealing with significant injuries and multiple quarterbacks. The more important question, though, is not whether seven games ordinarily provide enough evidence. It is whether Oregon had accumulated enough evidence in these seven games to believe waiting would change the direction of the offense, and increasingly, the answer was no.
