Dan Lanning Just Won’t Let This One Go

Dan Lanning just can’t seem to let go of Mike Gundy’s NIL comments. Days after Oregon dismantled Oklahoma State 69 to 3, the Ducks’ head coach is still bringing it up. This time, it came during his appearance on Wake Up Barstool. Lanning revisited the now-infamous claim from Gundy that Oregon spent close to $40 million on its football roster last year.

“His numbers were off, Brandon; it was more like $100 million we spent last year,” Lanning joked. “No, it wasn’t, but his numbers were off,” he added. “But look, in my position, you’re going to use any fuel you can to motivate your team, right? And sometimes you’re looking for it, and sometimes it just reveals itself. And we had an opportunity to do that.”

At this point, it is bordering on obsessive. Oregon won the game by 66 points. The Ducks dominated from start to finish. They made every statement they needed to on the field. And yet, Lanning still feels the need to bring Gundy’s comments back up while doing media appearances like he’s on a postgame victory lap.

No one is arguing that Oregon doesn’t spend big. Lanning didn’t deny it. He just wants to control the narrative about how it’s discussed. That’s fine, but the scoreboard already took care of that. The longer Lanning keeps rehashing this, the more it feels less like motivation and more like self-congratulation.

Gundy’s original comments were exaggerations, no doubt. But he wasn’t creating the conversation out of thin air. Coaches across the country are talking about NIL spending gaps and what they mean for competitive balance. Oregon is clearly on the high end of that scale. Oklahoma State is not. Lanning got the win, both on the field and in the discussion, but now he’s dragging the conversation further than it needs to go.

If the point was to prove Gundy wrong, Oregon did that convincingly. If the goal now is to keep reminding everyone of it, it starts to sound less like confidence and more like an overreaction. For a coach with one of the most well-funded rosters in the sport, Lanning is spending a surprising amount of energy on a guy who just got run out of the building.