"Terrible idea," "He's 100% right" - CFB fans divided over Oregon HC Dan Lanning's playoff format proposal

Oregon coach Dan Lanning has done an excellent job of building the Oregon Ducks football program over the past few years. This past season, he helped the Ducks win the Big Ten championship and remain undefeated throughout the regular season. As a result, many fans are on board with what he has to say about football strategy and coaching.

However, that does not mean that fans agree with everything he has to say. At the Big Ten media days on Wednesday, Lanning spoke about a change to the college football playoff format. Notably, he wants the season to finish sooner and stop top seeds from getting month-long byes that stop their momentum.

This proposal from Dan Lanning left fans divided. They made their feelings known in the comments on X.

"Terrible idea," one fan wrote.

"He’s 100% right on this," one fan commented.

"I wouldn’t even mind taking out conference championship games and starting round 1 of the playoffs that week. Teams with a bye would get 2 weeks off and the championship would be played on New Years Eve/Day every year," one fan wrote.

Fans continued to react in the comments.

"Here is a crazy take…… Stop using the bye week as an excuse!!!!! You had roughly the same time off as Ohio State you got smoked deal with it," one fan wrote.

"If you’re against this, then you’re either trolling or you have extremely low IQ…" one fan commented.

"Unpopular opinion: Labor Day weekend should continue to be embraced as the unofficial start of the fall and football season. Week 0 unnecessarily cuts into the precious summer months," one fan added.

Dan Lanning and the Oregon Ducks had nearly a month off between games last season

It is not hard to see where Dan Lanning is coming from. Last season, the Oregon Ducks had 25 days off between their win in the Big Ten championship game in early December and their quarterfinal matchup against Ohio State on January 1.

Oregon was not the only team impacted by the long break between the conference championship weeks and the college football playoff quarterfinals. Four teams earned byes to the quarterfinals: Oregon, Arizona State, Boise State and Georgia. All four lost their quarterfinal matchups to teams that needed to play in the first round of the CFP.

As a result, the argument could be made that some of those teams would have had different results if they did not have such a long layoff between games.

About the author

Alexander O'Reilly is a journalist at Sportskeeda from Kingston, Ontario with over seven years in the field at companies including SenShot, RVBlogger, Monarch Media, WordAgents, GSeC LLC, and IGC.

His favorite college team is Duke, and his favorite sporting memory was Duke winning March Madness in 2010. JJ Redick was Alex's favorite college player when he was young but more recently, Caleb Williams gets the nod. As the Chicago Bears are Alex's favorite NFL team, this was a perfect match.

Alex's proudest moment came when he was interviewed by a radio station in Ottawa on his opinion on recent moves by the Ottawa Senators, which gave him a confidence boost and the knowledge that he could succeed as a writer.

Aside from sports, Alex likes to spend his time playing games. He is also very passionate about running and strives to improve at the half and full marathon distances.

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