McLaughlin: When Will Oregon Fans Get A Major Breakthrough?
By SPENCER McLAUGHLIN
Contributor, 750 The Game
For the sake of their mental well-being, I hope that Oregon fans don’t routinely think about the 2025 Rose Bowl against Ohio State. Unfortunately I was thinking about it after this past weekend.
Oregon Baseball, hosting a regional in the NCAA Tournament, went a disappointing 0-2 in front of its home fans. Oregon Softball made a great run to the Women’s College World series, falling in a late-inning battle with UCLA and then Sunday to the 4-time reigning champion Oklahoma Sooners. Both teams won the Big 10 Championship. Both teams had the tools to have the sort of special season that is never forgotten. Both came up short.
Sound familiar?
Maybe it’s something in the drinking water in Oregon–which is better than any other state, by the way–that keeps the national titles away. By any metric, Oregon has a wildly successful athletic department. Teams across several sports regularly appear in postseason tournaments, often as a result of conference championships in the regular season. I get the sense that this sort of hardware is meaning less and less to Duck fans nowadays.
No, I don’t think the Oregon fanbase is quite as devastated at Spring sports’ shortcomings as they are football or basketball. But how much longer will Duck fans have to wait for a national title in a major sport? Track and Field titles add to the brand of ‘Tracktown USA’, but don’t deliver the sort of emotional payoff most are seeking.
If I had to guess, I would say Dan Lanning is the coach most likely to break through and claim a title first amongst his peers. Dana Altman is still a great coach, but I’m still wondering about a couple things with his program in the new world of college athletics. Mark Wasikowski has built a proven winner, but is yet to assemble an Omaha-worthy pitching staff. Missy Lombardi just reached the WCWS for the first time in her tenure, but annually has to try and get through Oklahoma at some point. I wouldn’t overlook Kelly Graves in this discussion, that just might be a few years away.
Lanning has proven to be an excellent recruiter and coach, one who has shown progress in the latter each year he’s spent in Eugene. Lanning’s teams have won 10, 12, and 13 games since taking over for Mario Cristobal. The Rose Bowl showed he still has plenty of room to grow, which is to be expected for a young head coach who isn’t even 40 years old.
For the sake of Oregon fans everywhere, I hope that breakthrough arrives in 2025. I have loftier hopes for 2026 given the timeline of the roster and the QB room. But would it be truly insane to see the Ducks win it all this year? College Football is littered with unproven quarterbacks and teams with plenty of question marks this season. As Ohio State showed last year, they just have to get hot at the right time.
From a fan’s standpoint, it is certainly a first-world problem to become numb to conference titles. Almost every school in the country would be thrilled with the season Oregon Football just had. The same can be said for the baseball program. Both left Duck fans with a sour taste in their mouths following postseason performances that saw them fall well short of expectations.
I’m a lifelong Mariners fan. Until their playoff appearance in 2022, I had never seen them play anything but regular season games. Fans in Seattle waited 21 years between trips to the postseason. On September 9th, 2022, Cal Raleigh hit the shot heard round Seattle. The drought was over, and in that moment two decades of suffering had all been worth it.
So when will Oregon’s time be to exercise its demons? Guess we just have to wait…and find out.
Spencer McLaughlin is an Oregon Ducks football contributor to 750 The Game. He also hosts the “Locked On Oregon Ducks” and “Locked On College Football” podcasts and has work featured throughout the season here.