The University of Oregon officially stepped into the Dan Lanning era late on Wednesday night. Oklahoma had just finished beating the Ducks 47-32 in the Alamo Bowl and I couldn’t help but think that the next time we’ll see them in a game will be with Lanning in charge on the sideline.

Against Georgia. …

In Atlanta. …

Should be interesting.

The Ducks were a mess for two quarters on Wednesday against the Sooners, then regrouped at halftime and played better. But I was struck by three things on the way to Oregon’s third loss in the last four games. Three things that Lanning can’t ignore if he’s going to be successful in Eugene.

They are:

Find a QB

College football is a quarterback-centric game. Oregon’s inability to identify, recruit and develop a formidable young quarterback in the wake of Marcus Mariota and Justin Herbert’s departures to the NFL is a glaring and woeful problem. One that should never have happened. The parade of transfers (Vernon Adams, Dakota Prukop and Anthony Brown) was interrupted only by Tyler Shough’s COVID-season cameo and hometown Herbert, who was essentially an accidental find. Even then, Herbert was never properly utilized by any of Oregon’s coaches in college.

I get it. The transfer portal is loaded with talent and has changed the calculus, but I need to see Lanning’s staff not only recruit blue-chip high school quarterbacks but develop them into starters. That failure goes down as the program’s biggest football sin in the last decade.

Lanning grabbed former Auburn quarterback Bo Nix out of the portal, probably because he’s not sure he has a game-ready QB on the roster. Mario Cristobal gets the blame there. But with Nix’s arrival I won’t be surprised in the next few days to see multiple UO quarterbacks jump into the portal themselves and look for new homes.

I’m good with the Ducks occasionally snatching a quarterback fix via transfer but the program recruits on a high enough level nationally to have a stockpile of talent at the quarterback position. Lanning can’t rely on that portal for his answer every season.

Get tough on D

It became evident as Oregon interviewed some candidates (Justin Wilcox, Kalani Sitake, Lanning in particular) that it was seeking a defensive-minded answer at head coach. On Wednesday night Oklahoma ran all over Oregon. I’ll bet Lanning was sick to his stomach. Caleb Williams threw three touchdown passes and the Sooners’ top two rushers (Kennedy Brooks and Eric Gray) carried a combined 22 times for 224 yards. It was another poor defensive performance from a defense that was riddled by bowl game opt-outs. Still, the Oregon defense was terrible when playing at full strength in the final four games of this season and gave up 38, 29, 38 and 47 points to opponents. Lanning has some star players on the roster but he’s in a race now against time and with some gifted offensive-minded coaches in the conference having a head start.

Also, there’s the matter of Lincoln Riley at USC.

When the Trojans hired Riley I waved it off. Good hire, but a little overhyped out of the gates. The rebuild at USC is going to be a steeper climb than most anticipate. Also, I wondered at the time if Riley would be able to recruit the best offensive lineman in the conference. But that was before Cristobal bolted to Miami, leveling the playing field there. I still think Riley is going to have a slower start than anticipated (seven wins in 2022?), but Lanning is going to be closely compared with Riley throughout their Pac-12 careers. They were hired in the same cycle, coach at perennial contenders in opposite divisions, and will compete for the same recruits. USC and Oregon won’t play in the 2022 regular season but they’re going to meet often in the recruiting world. Lanning needs some head-to-head wins there.

Find an identity

There’s an identity crisis going on at Oregon right now. The program had rich history and the trajectory was built by Rich Brooks, Mike Bellotti and eventually Chip Kelly. The football program has talked often since Kelly’s departure about what it wants to be. Mark Helfrich vowed to keep things the same, but fizzled out. Then, Willie Taggart went “Swag Surfin’” for a few months and Cristobal’s weekly mantras sounded like quotes from the Navy SEAL handbook. Lost in all of that was true program identity. It’s one thing to dream up clever slogans and talk about punching your opponent in the nose and planting a cleat in the turf but I didn’t really see an accurate identity transfer to the field for Oregon in the last couple of seasons.

What is Oregon’s football identity?

It’s not Nike, folks. That’s a big-time brand, not an identity.

Lanning needs to find an identity and cultivate it. Not with talk. But with authenticity. It’s a huge challenge for a 35-year-old first-time coach who is going to spend a lot of time early-on learning what it is to be a head coach. The development of identity takes months and sometimes years. Ask Brooks and Bellotti or Jonathan Smith at Oregon State. The challenge for Lanning is going to be to grow his own program identity while also facing intense public scrutiny and unrealistic expectations.

That letter written signed by 14 former star Oregon players and sent to AD Rob Mullens as he began the search for Cristobal’s replacement is an important piece in this discussion. We all see what those players see and wrote about. The Ducks have drifted off course since the firing of Mark Helfrich. They’ve lost connection with the past. As uncomfortable as it may have been for some of those 14 players to see their thoughts go public, they were spitting truth.

“This feeling comes not from wins and losses, but rather, the idea that in the attempt to chase a national championship, we are losing what made us great in the first place,” the players wrote.

Lanning was wise to address the program’s rich past and the wishes of those players in his introductory news conference. That’s the challenge. He’ll need to foster valuable ties with the Brooks, Bellotti and Kelly-era Ducks players and tap into that rich history while also forging his own identity. Watching the Oregon-Oklahoma bowl game was strange. Neither program had its future head coach on the sideline. A bunch of players decided not to play. So much felt up in the air. It was really just a bowl game and a bunch of TV commercials going on amid a lot of swirling speculation and questions. Amid that, I wondered: when we say “Dan Lanning’s Ducks” what will we immediately think about as their identity? Cristobal’s Ducks struggled with that for stretches and it kept the program from realizing its potential.

Lanning was hired weeks ago. But the Dan Lanning era didn’t begin until Wednesday night. The Ducks lost the Alamo Bowl. I don’t blame you if you turned the game off at halftime. But now we wait.

For Lanning.

For Sept. 3 and Georgia.

For a quarterback, a defense and an identity to be forged.