Published September 15, 2025

People will be talking about Saturday’s postgame comments from University of Oregon football coach Dan Lanning for a long time. It was a noble effort in some ways, an attempt to calm the waters during an awful time. But I want to talk about what’s easy to miss if you live in the major college sports bubble 24/7.

First, here are some of Lanning’s words. More are at the bottom of this post.

Absolutely worth three minutes of your time.

Dan Lanning with a lot of really poignant thoughts on the Charlie Kirk assassination.

“The US could learn a lot from our locker room… You walk in that locker room you’ve got guys of different races, backgrounds, religions, and… pic.twitter.com/8hsu17PuBE

— Brenna Greene (@BrennaGreene_) September 13, 2025

What I didn’t hear

The sports world could learn a lot from the rest of the U.S., Dan. A lot of the people I know, some of whom sleep on sidewalks or in tents along roads, would be taken aback if they walked through big-time college football locker rooms and other facilities, as I have. I’m not here to pick on Dan, but there are some big gaps in his pep talk.

Lockers a person could recline in to meditate or sleep. Climate-controlled rooms with nap pods. State-of-the-art weight rooms. Refrigerators stocked with protein drinks and more. Trained medical staff. Pool tables and foosball tables. Big-ass televisions. Hydrotherapy rooms. People to wash their uniforms and clean their practice shoes and their game shoes. Motivational posters and videos at their disposal. And so on, including nutritionists designing their closely monitored (and free) meal plan. Some of you have no idea.

I’d imagine it might help a group of people to put aside differences in race, background and religion and to rally around and love each other with that kind of no-cost-to-them material support — and a free education in exchange for your sweat and effort.

Don’t you?

Roofers, construction workers, teachers, cashiers, delivery drivers, food workers and many others can’t afford to live in the city where they work. Some have to sleep outside every night before going to work every day.

I agree: They could learn a lot from the Oregon Ducks locker room — probably not all of it a comfort to them as they fight to stay afloat in America.

Imagine if we helped everybody become the best version of themselves that way and set them up for success rather than set them up for failure.

UO’s facilities

At Oregon, they have Phil Knight money. Nike money. It’s a lot of green.

That video is 6 years old. Things are even better now.

There’s also the John E. Jaqua Center for Student Athletes.

There’s been a modern academic center for students who are athletes at LSU since Nick Saban insisted the university build one upon accepting the job of football coach there in 1999. He knew it would make moms and dads happier about sending their sons there to play for him.

Others’ facilities

You really should check out LSU’s football locker room …

There are locker rooms… And then there’s the #LSU locker room pic.twitter.com/3f7FG8QDu8

— LSU Football (@LSUfootball) July 22, 2019

… at the University of Texas …

https://t.co/ZTJGop1Bhr pic.twitter.com/kSxYWaCS1J

— Texas Football (@TexasFootball) August 6, 2025

… and at every university in this week’s AP Top 25 poll. Take your time. There are a lot of photos and videos that will blow your mind.

Maybe your team will win a championship and get some expensive rings.

‘Differences’

Kirk heavily criticized Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose name — as part of the street address of the building — is on the side of the Oregon athletic facility in the photo at the top of this post. Judge for yourself his intent when discussing his thoughts on seeing a Black pilot.

Kirk used a lot of dog whistles in his remarks wherever he went. Whether in fact-checks or analyses, we do a disservice to reality when we use the lazy default of “conservative” to label his beliefs. And yes, let me address this: In speaking about people like me, he used such phrases as “transgender craze,” “social contagion,” “trans zealots,” “purple-haired Jihadis” and “thinking you are a leopard when you are a human.”

If anyone uses such anti-trans terms as “transgender ideology” or “transgenderism” or calls us “transgenders” or “transgendered,” they are not operating in good faith or from a place of widely accepted best practices.

It struck me when Lanning said:

There’s a lot of things that Charlie said that I did not agree (with) at all. There’s a lot of things he said that I did agree with. But what is disappointing is, I could respect those differences, and somebody else couldn’t.”

I can’t respect those differences, not when there are databases of people like me targeted for doxxing or worse. Not when I have to be worried I could be gunned down in, or abducted from, the parking lot of my medical clinic. Not when I have a target on my back and have had one there all year. For many vulnerable and marginalized people, these go way beyond being differences.

Big holes in that speech

Major college football coaches and players don’t live in the real world. Not the way most of the rest of us do. The weekend was another reminder of that.

Again, I understand the point Lanning was trying to make, but the Oregon football locker room and the rest of the U.S. are like apples and horse apples. The structure of big-time college athletics removes many of the impediments to teamwork and collegiality that exist in an increasingly hostile job market and economy.

It’s naive to think his team’s camaraderie is translatable to the rest of the country without a whole lot of material support being brought to bear.

We could do it. We choose not to.

Players are historically big men on campus, with their dance cards typically filled up, and with a lot of years of privilege already in their back pocket. Many of them have had schools look the other way at their bad behavior, and they are given the benefit of the doubt in ways that girls — and their nerdy classmates — are not.

How do we apply the dynamics and lessons of your locker room to the rest of the U.S. without all of those perks, Dan?

I can imagine the criticism of this blog post. I’ll be quick to close comments if they get nasty. Rest assured I’ll have IP and email addresses and other data to show law enforcement if I’m threatened. It’s a scary time for me.

I started writing professionally about sports in 1983. I’ve seen a lot of young people escape hardscrabble environments through athletics, so I get the positives. I’d like to see more opportunities for people who can’t run fast or catch a ball or play a game well.

I’m old and tired and in pain and frightened, so I’ll stop there. You can probably think of a lot more ways that Lanning’s words don’t easily carry over into most of our lives.

Protect your peace. Sending love.

♥

Thank you

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Credits

Featured image of Muscle Milk bottles by rblfmr via Shutterstock.

Photograph of U of O academic center by Ken Wolter via Shutterstock.

Photo of championship rings by ChicagoPhotographer via Shutterstock.

Photo of Oregon facility by Kip C Anderson via Shutterstock.

Transcription of Lanning comments posted by Matt Fortuna on Bluesky.