Dan Lanning: Explaining why Oregon coach will not leave Ducks for an SEC job

College football analyst Josh Pate can’t see Dan Lanning leaving Oregon because it’s too good of a situation. Not only that, Lanning is a pretty darn good coach and has the Ducks No. 2 in the country right now.

It’s a combination of recruiting power, transfer portal success and yes, money. As in, Phil Knight and Nike money!

“Here’s what anyone needs to understand. Dan’s not leaving Oregon. He’s not leaving Oregon because at Oregon, it’s the only place where you have a deal with the school and you’ve got a separate deal with Phil Knight, basically,” Pate said on The Colin Cowherd Podcast on The Volume. “I mean, we talk about buyouts all the time, and typically you’re talking about, oh, it’s going to cost 8 million, 10 million, 12 million. When you really understand Dan Lanning’s life there, you’re talking about a 40 to $50 million buyout. No one’s willing to do that, nor should they, and even if it wasn’t that.

“So let’s pretend that wasn’t the case. Let’s just pretend all the rest of the dynamics were in place at Oregon. You mentioned facilities. Another thing people need to know is, when you go up there right now, you sit in his office, you look out. It’s cranes everywhere. It’s earth moving everywhere, because they’re overhauling it again. So this time next year, they’ll be ahead of the pack again on that front.” 

Lanning is 40-6 in three-plus seasons at Oregon and led the Ducks to a Big Ten title last year, earning the No. 1 overall seed in the College Football Playoff. That’s certainly possible again as Lanning and crew seem to get better and better every year. They’ve cracked the code!

“Go back to that game against Penn State the other night and understand what you watched Oregon, they recruit at a very high level already,” Pate said. “They’ve mastered evaluation in the portal. You can’t have one of those things without the other. Okay, otherwise you’re just lighting money on fire. Nebraska spent over a million dollars on a right tackle that hasn’t seen the field, so you got to be able to evaluate as well. Marshall Malchow is a really good dude running point for Dan landing up there, but Lanning himself and that staff, they are really good at evaluating.”

Dan Lanning in a perfect spot at Oregon, per Josh Pate

Lanning might even have a Heisman QB in Dante Moore, who transferred in last year and sat behind Dillon Gabriel. But he wasn’t the only portal success.

“So you turn on the Penn State game the other night, they’ve got 11 guys they took out of the portal. I think I counted 10 of them are contributing big time,” Pate said. “They got three starting offensive linemen. They’ve got multiple DBs. In fact, the guy that people were most crazy about, Makai Hughes, the tailback that came from Tulane, that’s the only one that you would call, quote, unquote, a bust. And he’s not really a bust. He’s just a depth provider, right? They’re doing stuff, in other words, that you used to get told you couldn’t do, it was a chore. You had to clear the hurdle. 150% of what the southern schools did to get talent there. You don’t have to anymore.”

Lanning can basically do everything and anything he wants at Oregon. Why move schools just to do it?

“You don’t have to, so what’s the downside, as long as you don’t mind a couple of extra hours on your plane rides every now and then,” Pate said. “You you’ve got it set up there. He’s not lying when he says they’re all in on living in Oregon like, he’s not lying about that. They just happen to find the right guy from the South who is the closest to a Nick Saban, to Kirby Smart to now Dan Lanning. He looks like a psychopath. His eyes are really like that, even when he just talks to you on a normal Tuesday over lunch. It fits.”