It is absolutely time to hit the panic meter for the Oregon Ducks after their loss to Illinois. Earlier this season, I said I wouldn’t panic about Oregon.

Dan Lanning had to replace two coordinators who left to become Power 4 head coaches, and replicating that production is hard. Down years are part of the modern era of college football. Parity, a thin margin for error, and a lack of depth make every program uncomfortable at some point.

But we are past the point where any of that is an excuse anymore.

Illinois is not the team you lose to like this

Look at who Oregon actually lost to. Illinois has already fired its defensive coordinator. Illinois needed overtime to get past Michigan State, lost to Purdue, wasn’t competitive against Ohio State, and lost to Duke. The Ducks scored fewer points against that defense than all of those teams, and it wasn’t close.

UAB scored more against Illinois than Oregon did. Southern Illinois scored the same amount. That is alarming.

Then you get to the box score, and it gets worse. Oregon put up 10 points and went 4-of-15 on third down. The Ducks finished with more first downs and over 100 more yards than Illinois. And a team that threw for 89 passing yards still beat them by 11.

Let’s call a spade a spade. With that much money invested in a program, rolling over like that is inexcusable.

Absences weren’t an excuse either for this team

And you may say, Tegan, Oregon had wide receivers out for this game. Fair enough. Oregon is banged up, and everybody understands why Evan Stewart wasn’t playing.

But the absences weren’t only about injuries. The tight grip everybody thought Lanning had on this locker room looks like it is quickly unraveling, and that worries me more than any single stat from this game.

This loss belongs in the same conversation as Penn State losing to UCLA last year, when the Nittany Lions fell to a coach who didn’t even seem to know how to turn on his play-calling microphone. That’s how bad this one is.

The high floor was supposed to save Oregon

Here’s what makes this so hard to process. Oregon was supposed to have a high floor. The Ducks brought in Dylan Raiola as the future at quarterback. Dante Moore was going to have a great season, and if he got banged up, Oregon would still have one of the best backup situations in the entire country.

That was the plan. Talent was never the problem. Oregon has all the talent in the world, and it still went out and scored 10 points against a defense that has been giving up yardage to everybody else on its schedule.

So where does this program go from here? Is this a coaching problem, a culture problem, or a team that simply lost the ability to finish drives? The longer I sit with the numbers, the more baffled I get. Normally I’m the guy pumping the brakes on panic, telling people one ugly loss doesn’t define a season. This one is different, because the warning signs didn’t start against Illinois. They just got impossible to ignore.

I’m putting my right hand up on this one. I have no clue where Oregon goes from here, and for a program with these resources, that might be the most disappointing verdict of all.