PASADENA, Calif. — Players and staff members shuffle out of the Oregon football locker room and collect pre-prepared meals as coach Dan Lanning and athletic director Rob Mullens pull up on a golf cart.
Both are silent. Lanning just completed a 10-minute postgame press conference alongside seniors Dillon Gabriel and Jeff Bassa, both of whom hop off the back of the cart and make their way into the bowels of the Rose Bowl.
Emotions are still fresh from the Ducks’ 41-21 drubbing at the hands of Ohio State. The usually cheerful and at times goofy Gabriel appeared despondent, changing alone at his locker while a somber Tez Johnson answered final questions from media nearby.
The rest of the Oregon locker room was mostly cleared out, save for the stragglers still in the shower or collecting their things. Terrance Ferguson looked down in reflection as his Oregon career was over. Lanning walked through the center of the room without much else to say, having already given a postgame speech to a team he said he “loves” as its season came to a bitter and unexpected end.
With the curtain pulled back and the full story told, the juxtaposition was jarring between the emotional and narratively compelling highs of Oregon’s historic season and the sharp, sudden sting of the final act.
The Ducks touted their culture and connection in the lead-up to the complicated and ever-debated 12-team College Football Playoff. They had few moments of real doubt throughout a previously 13-0 campaign that included a Big Ten championship in their first year in the conference and wins on the road at Michigan and Wisconsin.
If fans tuned in to the in-house “Ducks vs. Them” docuseries each week, they saw a team that believed in its ability to go all the way — and were given good reason to believe right alongside them.
But such is the cruelty and uncertainty of sport: the 2024 Ducks are not alone among great teams in program history who came up short of their stated goal. It had to feel like destiny for Marcus Mariota, until Ezekiel Elliott and the Buckeyes ran Oregon over. And for LaMichael James and Darron Thomas, until Michael Dyer rolled on top of a defender and kept running. Jeremiah Smith slammed the door shut on the Ducks on Wednesday amid his meteoric rise.
Oregon is not unique in its relationship with the unforgiving. Even established dynasties at other programs have a laundry list of what-ifs. But the thought of having to go through all of this again, focused as the Ducks were on the process this season with so little time for joy and reflection, has to feel like an immense weight. As does clearing that elusive, final hurdle of a first national championship.
As Oregonian sports columnist Bill Oram pointed out, the Ducks will reload. They will perhaps be more talented next season than this one, with a darkhorse Heisman candidate at quarterback in Dante Moore. But they have to do all of this again, and avoid running into a buzzsaw come playoff time like they did this year. Luck and circumstance can have nearly as much to do with achieving championship glory as talent and belief.
And it’s over for seniors like Gabriel, Johnson and Ferguson. They are left with the burden of every graduating class in Oregon’s modern history: handing the ball off to the next generation and telling them to go score.
There are other powerful programs and increasingly volatile external circumstances standing between them and that proverbial end zone.
The locker room is empty now. It will be filled again, with talent and speeches and belief.
But to what end?
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