A long road to a meteoric rise: A 13-hour, Mountain Dew-fueled drive and Dan Lanning’s path to stardom
Credit to Author: Paolo Uggetti| Date: Sat, 17 Aug 2024 09:09:40 EST
Ducks coach Dan Lanning mentions Kirby Smart’s jab at Oregon’s NIL program while talking about recruiting with Pat McAfee. (1:35)
EUGENE, Ore. — The first thing Dan Lanning notices when I step into his office is my shoes.
“You’re wearing Reeboks in here, man?” he says, pointing at my Club C sneakers. Lanning, of course, is in head-to-toe Nike. He smiles. “Don’t worry, I won’t get you in trouble with anyone.”
When he was a high school PE teacher and assistant with a desire to coach at a Division I level, it’s safe to say Lanning never thought it would happen in Eugene. But now that he’s here, it doesn’t take much to see how comfortable he is.
Eugene is removed and quiet, while the presence of the university permeates the entire city. It has the passionate fan base that Lanning has experienced at SEC schools before, the national Nike appeal and the resources of a powerhouse ready to do the most important thing: win.
At 38 years old, Lanning’s position is unique. Not only is he one of the youngest head coaches in college football, but he and his team find themselves squarely in the center of the sport. The Ducks are ranked No. 3 in the AP preseason poll, are the second-favorite to win the Big Ten and are expected to not just make the 12-team College Football Playoff, but make a run at a title. Their recruiting is one of the best in the country and their name, image and likeness prowess, fueled by Nike founder and Oregon booster Phil Knight, seems to be the envy of the sport.
This is exactly what Lanning wanted. This is what he has prepared the past 14 years for. This is why, when his former boss Nick Saban retired at the end of last season, Lanning — who was rumored to be one of the top choices for the Alabama job — didn’t entertain the position.
“I feel like I have the things necessary here to win. So how much money does a person need to make? What do you really need in your life?” Lanning said. “For me, I want to be in a place where I can win championships. I feel like we’re close to that here. And then there is a level of loyalty to people that gave you an opportunity. Why should anybody ever trust me again if I, if I do leave here for something else?”
Oregon, perhaps more than any other program in recent years, knows the feeling well of being left behind for something else.
Lanning, like many young coaches, is an amalgamation of his previous experiences and thus, the previous head coaches who gave him those crucial opportunities — a list that includes Saban, Todd Graham, Mike Norvell and Kirby Smart. He has also had nearly every job you can have in the sport — from graduate assistant, to recruiting coordinator, to special teams coach, to defensive coordinator.
It has all positioned him perfectly for what today’s college football coaches have to be: a CEO-type with an ability to oversee an entire program without losing a keen eye for detail. Lanning’s youth is matched by his confidence, variety of experiences and ability to draw people in. A former coach he worked with said he’s “as comfortable in a room with a $20 million donor as he is with the third-string linebacker.”
“He’s got a lot of experience for a 38-year-old,” said Graham, who first hired Lanning when he was the head coach at Pittsburgh. “[Oregon has] a synergy with him and he’s just getting started. This guy, he isn’t even close to reaching his potential.”
ONE COULD CALL it bold. Others could argue it was ludicrous. Even now, 13 years later, Lanning would simply deem it necessary.
That’s how he found himself inside his truck, blaring old CDs, drinking Mountain Dew and rolling the windows open to stay awake as he sped east down Interstate 70 on a 13-hour road trip from Kansas City to Pittsburgh. Whatever scenery may have wallpapered the overnight journey that cut through Missouri, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio into Pennsylvania was mostly invisible. Lanning was heading toward his future in the dark.
“There was certainly a lot of intent,” Lanning said. “I was dreaming big. I wanted to be part of a Division I staff.”
Lanning didn’t have a glowing résumé. He was a 24-year-old high school teacher and an assistant at Park Hill South High School in North Kansas City who coached defensive backs, special teams and wide receivers. It was mid-January and school was in session, so Lanning had taught class earlier that day and once the school day was over, he got in his car and started to drive.
No one knew he was coming, but Lanning knew why he was going there. Graham, the former Tulsa coach — whom Lanning had met multiple times when attending coaching clinics at the school — had just taken the Pittsburgh head-coaching job. Lanning saw an opening, if ever so small, to make his move.
“For me, it was like this little sliver of hope,” Lanning said. “Like this might be my only opportunity.”
The feeling Lanning carried with him throughout the trip, the feeling that he kept coming back to even as he was tired or questioned what he was doing, even as he had to stop at a gas station near campus to change into a suit or park half a mile away to try to, as Lanning explained, “sneak,” into the facility, was not either success or failure, but rather regret.
“I just didn’t want to be the guy that was sitting on his recliner 15 years later saying, ‘Man, what if I would’ve just got my car and drove to Pittsburgh?'” Lanning said. “The whole drive there, it was kind of the same thought. I never really spent any time thinking about, this might not work out. I just wanted to think about, ‘If I don’t do this, how much will I regret it?'”
Lanning got to Pittsburgh around 5 a.m. and made it all the way to the Pitt lobby before a graduate assistant, Eric Thatcher, told him the bad news: The coaches were at a clinic at Penn State. Lanning would have to wait a little longer. He got a room at the local Spring Hill and returned the next day to meet with defensive coordinator Keith Patterson. Lanning made an immediate impression on him, as well as on Graham.
Above all, Graham remembered Lanning’s persistence, which led him and Patterson to allow Lanning to stick around and volunteer. The door was now ajar — Lanning drove all the way back to Kansas City and resigned from his high school job the same day.
“He’d saved money for a year to do this, and his wife stayed in Kansas City. He wouldn’t take no for an answer,” Graham said. “Then he immediately starts outworking everybody in the building.”
On a staff that included current Florida State coach Mike Norvell, Lanning quickly impressed those around him and made the leap from volunteer to intern to graduate assistant in three months.
“There was never a task that was too small for him,” Norvell said. “He never went through the motions. I knew if I was ever to get the opportunity to be a head coach, he is definitely a guy that I wanted on my staff.”
Lanning looks back at Pitt as not just an opportunity but a wake-up call. He learned how much he didn’t know, he “failed a ton” and realized that his journey would require patience, effort and a whole lot of learning. Just six months into working with Lanning, Graham knew his assistant had the ingredients to achieve his lofty goal: becoming a Division I head coach and winning a national title.
The overnight dash to Pittsburgh had gotten Lanning in the building, but it was his work there that earned him a job as a GA — and eventually as a recruiting coordinator — at Arizona State when Graham took the head-coaching job there in 2012. Even as a grad assistant, Lanning would be bold enough to make suggestions in meetings based on his own film study. Some coaches on staff were bothered by it. Soon though, even the veterans came to respect his suggestions.
“Coaches don’t like that. They don’t like young, hotshot guys,” Graham said. “And then after a year, everybody in the building loves this guy. So not only does he have the work ethic, but he has the talent. And what I mean by talent, to me, coaching is relationships and there’s no one better than him at relationships in my opinion.”
After those two years as a graduate assistant and recruiting coordinator at Arizona State, Lanning got his first full-time job as a defensive backs coach and co-recruiting coordinator at Sam Houston State. Graham, who credited Lanning for the defense ASU played over his two seasons there, still rues allowing him to leave.
“Dumbest thing I ever did was let him do that,” Graham said. “I should have fired somebody and hired him. I should have hired him there and kept him there. Then he goes from there to Alabama as a GA and then goes to Memphis. And then I offered him the defensive coordinator job. Heck, I’d probably still be at Arizona State if he’d have taken it.”
But Graham knows there was nothing he could have done to keep Lanning around for long. This was just the beginning.
DESPITE WHAT HE told Graham when he was in his mid-20s, Lanning’s mindset has changed over the years.
When his wife, Sauphia, was diagnosed with bone cancer in late 2016 while he was the inside linebackers coach at Memphis, Lanning’s focus shifted away from his head-coaching dreams and toward his family.
By the time he got the job offer to be the outside linebackers coach at Georgia in 2018, Sauphia was cancer-free. Lanning took over as defensive coordinator a year later and he now admits that he relished that position and enjoyed it to the point where he was satisfied if he never became a head coach.
“But those opportunities came,” Lanning said. At the end of 2021, Lanning took the first head-coaching job of his career at Oregon. “I didn’t want to become a head coach where I couldn’t be great, where I couldn’t compete for championships, where I could be ahead of the curve. I was at a point at Georgia where I wasn’t going to leave for a place that I didn’t feel I could do it. Oregon checked all those boxes.”
Everything before had prepared him for this. Lanning’s résumé doubles as an ideal graduate program for anyone wanting to be a head coach. One year at Alabama under Saban. Two years at Memphis under Mike Norvell. Three years at Georgia under Kirby Smart.
“Dan is a sponge. I don’t think Dan does everything exactly like I did it. I don’t think he does everything exactly like Nick did it, but I think he’s taken the best of every situation he’s been in,” Graham said. “I think he is a combination of those people, and the one thing that I think is his secret to his sauce to what he does, the guy learns. He is a learner and once he learns it, he’s got it.”
It doesn’t take much to see that certain standard play out in Eugene. From Saban, he learned “robotic consistency” to the day-to-day, which now plays out in how Oregon approaches practices, which are planned down to almost the second with no time being wasted. From Smart, he learned how to adapt defensive personnel in the middle of games depending on what the opponent was doing. From Norvell, Lanning — a defensive coach — learned about the offensive side of the ball, which is now under his purview at Oregon.
It’s not just the variety of coaches Lanning has worked under, but also the plethora of jobs he has held. Lanning says he prided himself on finding the jobs nobody else wanted to do and excelling at them. He knew, even back then, those experiences would help him when he ascended to his goal of being a head coach.
“It has just shaped him into the head coach he is today, which is a guy who can do it all if he needed to,” Oregon offensive coordinator Will Stein said. “If every coordinator was out sick, or at some crazy emergency, Dan could call the offense, defense and special teams, call the whole game on his own. If the recruiting department was all out for some reason, he could run the recruiting department too. No job is too big for Dan … he’d sweep the floors if he had to.”
Current players and assistants alike rave about Lanning’s ability to connect with people. His personality — a cocktail of focus, intensity and drive — creates a magnetism that is palpable any time you speak with anyone else wearing Oregon colors.
“I think he connects well with the players because he’s not like a grandpa,” quarterback Dillon Gabriel said. “I think he does a damn good job of being real. He is able to be vulnerable with us and that allows us to be vulnerable, which makes you gain confidence in one another and get closer.”
“He’s the same guy every day, never too high, never too low,” Stein said. “He’s always in the middle. When your leader, when your boss is the consistent person in the building, everyone strives to match his intensity and knowledge.”
Lanning isn’t doing anything groundbreaking in being able to relate to players while also coaching them hard. But as Graham and Norvell point out, those two go hand in hand. And it’s the combination of Lanning’s personality with his football acumen and competitive determination that makes him unique.
“Plenty of people get opportunities and don’t capitalize,” Norvell said. “But you take work ethic and intelligence, that’s a good recipe for success, and that’s who Dan is.”
THERE IS A game that is embedded deep in Lanning’s memory and it’s not one when he coached in any capacity.
It was 2004 and a teenage Lanning was a senior tight end and defensive end for Richmond High School in Missouri. His team was playing local rival Harrisonville in a semifinal matchup, and Lanning can still recall how Harrisonville ran a reverse in the first half for a touchdown that helped its team secure the win.
“After the game, you got your jersey and your pants ’cause it was your senior year, and it’s the end,” Lanning said. “And my pants are still stained with blue from the paint from their field. So yeah, I remember the losses a little more than the wins.”
Lanning’s competitive nature takes on many forms. Plenty of his players have experienced it in practice. Others have felt the force of it while playing cornhole.
“We were at his house eating and he came up to me and he was like, ‘I need a cornhole partner. Can you be my partner?'” sophomore quarterback Dante Moore said. “I was like, ‘I don’t know, Coach, I don’t know if I’m that good.’ He looked at me, he was like, ‘Nah, I don’t want you on my team then.'”
Recently, Gabriel became acquainted with Lanning’s competitive nature on the golf course when the coach invited him out to play nine holes after workouts.
“I started with a par 4. I made par and he doubled bogey, but he got competitive, so s— started getting serious,” Gabriel said. “I messed up beating him on the first hole, I’ll tell you that because then he started playing lights out.”
The dedication to succeed and the sheer distaste for failure that runs through Lanning also runs through this Oregon team. Despite the 22 wins over the past two seasons, the two losses to rival Washington still live inside Lanning’s mind, not as regrets but as learning experiences.
“I think you’re going to not always have success,” Lanning said. “But when you feel like you can control it, that’s the part that always bothers me. If there’s something that I can do to control it to make it a little bit better, that’s the part that I want to improve.”
Despite losing Bo Nix to the NFL, Oregon has improved this offseason. The Ducks are returning several starters on both sides of the ball and have added a slew of talent through the portal, including six former four-star prospects and one five-star. Not only did they get Gabriel through the portal, but also Moore as a potential quarterback of the future to account for one of the five best recruiting classes in 2024. And look beyond this season, the Ducks should have at least one of the 10 best in 2025.
Oregon’s ability to lure talent is about its recent success, it’s about having Lanning at the helm and the ability to win at a high level, but it is also about the program’s resources. It is no secret that 86-year-old Phil Knight wants Oregon to win a championship and has provided the program with ample resources to do just that. Even Lanning’s former boss has chimed in on the topic recently.
“I wish I could get some of that NIL money [Knight’s] giving Dan Lanning,” Smart said at SEC media days.
When asked about Smart’s comments in July, Lanning had his answer ready.
“I’m glad he’s paying attention to what we got going on out here,” Lanning said. “I think that’s great that they think so highly of Nike like we do. I think he’s just poking the bear a little bit.”
As he leans back in his chair inside his office, Lanning’s knowing grin speaks volumes. Even after just two years, Lanning has made a home in and out of the Oregon facility. He isn’t just comfortable here but also content. All of this made it easier for him to not flinch when the Alabama job opened up and his name was immediately thrown around like a football at Thanksgiving. Lanning said he never even entertained it.
“When you make decisions before opportunities arise, I think it’s really easy,” Lanning said. “And my family and I made a decision a long time ago, this will be, for us, the last place that we coach …. That means I have to win.”
Whether he wants it or not, Lanning is now Eugene’s beloved son. Unlike Mario Cristobal and Willie Taggart before him, Lanning has stayed. He hasn’t used Oregon as a launching pad but rather viewed it as a destination.
“He’s wanted it his entire life. That was his mission,” Graham said. “I wouldn’t worry about Dan going anywhere else unless he wins three or four national championships or something and then he might want to go win a Super Bowl.”
Even though he is only two years into his head-coaching career, it’s clear to Lanning, more than anyone, he is exactly where he needs to be. The only thing left to do now is win.