Oregon coach Dan Lanning shared his solution to success for the 12-team College Football Playoff.
"Just win. Just win," Lanning said to sports columnist John Canzano on his "The Bald Faced Truth" radio show. "They can't deny you if you just win. You can't complain if you just win."
The Ducks are 12–0, the only undefeated team in the nation, going into Saturday's Big Ten championship game versus Penn State. No other team is in a better position as far as controlling its standing in the CFP bracket. Win on Saturday and Oregon holds its position as the top seed.
Even with a loss, the Ducks are in an excellent position, though might not have a first-round bye. But that would go against Lanning's formula in preventing outside forces from affecting his team's fate.
Canzano asserted that ESPN "are SEC honks" as the conference's TV partner and will thus tout teams like Texas, Georgia, Tennessee and Alabama for top spots in the CFP rankings. Lanning didn't dispute that notion.
"They pay the bills, right? I mean, doesn't the SEC pay their bills? Who's their contract with?" he said. "That's how it works. Let's not pretend it doesn't work different than that."
Lanning's obvious counterpoint is that no one on the CFP committee, analysts on ESPN, college football media or biased fanbases can dispute the place of a team that hasn't lost.
However, the Oregon coach took an additional shot at the teams unhappy over possibly getting excluded from the CFP bracket because they lost games during the regular season. Those include three SEC teams—Alabama, Ole Miss and South Carolina—with 9–3 records. (Maybe Clemson from the ACC is included in that bunch, as well.)
"If you lose three games," he said, "shame on you—right?"