When No. 6 Oregon humiliated Oklahoma State 69-3 on Saturday, the Ducks were playing with a little extra fire. Ducks quarterback Dante Moore said the team was given some extra motivation after statements by Oklahoma State coach Mike Gundy earlier in the week.
Moore was referencing Gundy’s claims on his radio show that Oregon was “paying a lot of money for their team.” Gundy followed up by saying, “it’ll cost a lot of money to keep” Moore under center in the future.
Lanning was quick to respond to the comments.
“If you want to be a top-10 team in college football, you better be invested in winning,” Lanning said on Monday. “We spend to win. Some people save to have an excuse for why they don’t. … I can’t speak on their situation; I have no idea what they got in their pockets over there.”
Whether driven by Gundy’s comments or not, Oregon’s domination was the worst loss for Oklahoma State since before Oklahoma actually became a state.
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“When you attack our head coach, it’s like attacking my dad, to be honest,” Moore said after Saturday’s beatdown. “It’s like you’re attacking a family member. I feel like, as a whole team, it hit close to home. We knew that, every week, there’s always going to be some trash talk coming. But for him to attack Phil [Knight], and to attack Coach Lanning, attack our team, was kind of personal.
“This whole week, we just used it as fire to push ourselves and score 69 points, and we did that. There was a lot of fire under this game, but overall I feel like we were cool, calm and collected, but Coach Lanning said we were going to keep our foot on their neck and make sure we score these points and try to break the scoreboard.”
After the thrashing, Gundy tried to clarify that his earlier comments were meant as complimentary toward Oregon and the commitment that the school had made to succeeding in an era dominated by the transfer portal and NIL deals.
“When I made that comment, I was complimenting Oregon for what they had done,” Gundy said. “Second thing, which I said later in the week, is, we’ve made commitments also, but we have to be better and fundamentally sound and execute. … Sometimes you’re going to play people that have the ability to run away from you. We gotta look at that and see where we’re at. We didn’t play good enough, in the systems that we had, to put ourselves in that position.”
For his part, Lanning said he has tremendous respect for Gundy, but that the result likely had the Oklahoma State coach saying, “I told you so” about Oregon’s financial resources.
