Dan Lanning looks back on his initial interview with Oregon

Coming off a 12-win season and looking to reach the College Football Playoff in 2024 as the field expands, Dan Lanning is doing a masterful job so far as Oregon‘s coach.

So far the fit between coach and program has been like a glove, with Lanning orchestrating a whole lot of winning in his two seasons in charge. The Ducks are 22-5, with a 15-3 mark in Pac-12 play.

But the current head coach wasn’t even entirely sure he’d get the job two years ago. In fact, it emerged somewhat out of the blue, without obvious connections or relationships what would have facilitated the hire in the first place.

“There were some opportunities to interview for head coaching jobs before, so it wasn’t my first interview. But they kind of come to you,” Dan Lanning explained on a recent episode of Bussin with the Boys. “You don’t know when it’s going to come.”

The head coach broke down when it was that he first learned of Oregon’s interest. He was serving as the defensive coordinator at Georgia at the time.

“On this one I’m actually flying on a trip to Miami to do official visits, so I’m recruiting for Georgia and at the time really, really satisfied with my situation at Georgia,” Dan Lanning said. “We had just lost the SEC Championship, I’m kind of focused on the Orange Bowl. But I’m going down here to recruit a kid and I get a call saying, ‘Hey, these guys want to hop on a Zoom.’ So I do a Zoom in an airport, FBO, throw on kind of a suit coat and that was just kind of the start of it.

“It really escalated really fast after that night, after that initial Zoom with some more phone calls. It goes quick. You never know when it’s going to come. There were times where I thought I would get offered a head coaching job and I didn’t. And then this one was probably one that I didn’t think was necessarily (going to).”

Suffice it to say both sides are pretty pleased with how things have worked out so far. Connections or not Lanning has gotten the job done, both an excellent recruiter and a terrific on-field coach.

Sometimes it just works out like that.

“I didn’t have a connection to Oregon, I’d never been to Oregon till I got off the plane here as the head coach,” Dan Lanning said. “I knew what it was, somewhere I wanted to be, but I wasn’t as familiar with it or had any ties to it. So going through that process every one of them is different and this one, you could tell that there was a really unique vision and it was all in sync, it all aligned with what you’d want as a head coach.”