Every high level player or coach will tell you the process is more important than the results in building a program and attempting to win a game. The problem is that in sports, the results speak louder than the process that led to them. The scoreboard says you win or you lose. The result is a cold binary, even when the process is deeply nuanced.
Consider the fact that Washington is, by multiple measures, perhaps the best offense in college football. That alone means that you have to change the calculus of how you think a game should be managed by a coach when facing the Huskies. But for Oregon’s Dan Lanning, it didn’t, because he’s already aggressive in his fourth-down decision making in an effort to maximize the opportunities at points for his team. When Oregon ran a fake punt with a 300-pound defensive lineman as a ball carrier from their own 17-yard line against Colorado while leading by 13, Lanning was lauded as a wily gambler. When Oregon got stopped on fourth down (as it did against Washington and Oregon State last year) Lanning got crushed as foolhardy for losing the game for his team. Such is the dichotomy of weighing the process against the results—which, in this case, was a 36–33 Huskies win.
While these decisions are not all the same, they speak to Oregon’s aggressive identity. How these decisions play out underscores the fact that merely making the call to go for it or not is not the only factor involved here. Oregon went 0-for-3 on fourth downs against Washington. The decision to go for it all three times does not reflect a poor process, but the Ducks got none of them as a result of their own execution lacking and Washington's defense rising to the task.
