This late into the college football season, it can sometimes hard for teams to pick up quality wins for their College Football Playoff resumes and postseason pictures.
That wasn’t the case for No. 5 Oregon (No. 7 College Football Playoff) and Dan Lanning on Saturday, Nov. 22, as the Ducks earned their biggest win at home of the season with a 42-27 victory over No. 16 USC (No. 15 in CFP).
In the process of discussing his team’s win, Lanning may have taken a shot at teams from other conferences in his postgame news conference — specifically, their practice of scheduling non-conference games against Group of Five or FCS programs.
‘Played a good team. We beat them, right? All we can do next week is try to do the same thing, right? This conference is a really good conference. It’s competitive,’ Lanning said. ‘We didn’t play Chattanooga State today, right? Like some other places. We competed.
‘That being said, it’s tough playing nine conference games. It’s tough playing in this league. And we got to take advantage of playing a good team today and attacking that.’
To Lanning’s point, six of the 13 SEC teams in action in Week 13 played ‘buy games.’ No. 3 Texas A&M, No. 10 Alabama and Auburn picked up wins over FCS opponents in Samford, Eastern Illinois and Mercer, respectively.
No. 4 Georgia picked up a win over Charlotte, South Carolina defeated Coastal Carolina and LSU won a close game against Western Kentucky.
The SEC did feature four conference games on Nov. 22, with No. 8 Oklahoma beating No. 21 Missouri, No. 13 Vanderbilt beating Kentucky, No. 18 Texas beating Arkansas and No. 20 Tennessee beating Florida.
With its win over USC, Oregon kept itself in the mix for the Big Ten championship game. The Ducks not only need to beat Washington in Week 14, but also need Ohio State to lose to Michigan in ‘The Game.’ The Ducks are set to close out the season on Saturday, Nov. 29 against the Huskies in Seattle.
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