Dan Lanning reflects on getting into college coaching
Dan Lanning’s path to becoming a college head coach had humble beginnings. Before taking over at Oregon in 2022, Lanning began his career as an assistant at Park Hill South High School in 2008.
Lanning knew he wanted to move up to a higher level, but with little connections in the college coaching world, he had to rely on sheer determination. He reached out to countless programs hoping someone would be willing to take a chance on him with few responses.
Three years passed by before he finally got his opportunity. He received a call from someone on the staff at Pittsburgh informing him of an opening on the staff. After not receiving a call back, however, Lanning decided he wasn’t going to let that deter him.
“A guy had called me and said, ‘we might have something after signing day’ and the phone call never came,” Lanning explained on The Ryen Russillo Podcast. “So I got in my car and drove to Pitt. Drove through the night. Threw on a suit right before I got to the facility and waited there in the lobby until I realized the coaching staff wasn’t there that day. They were somewhere else doing a clinic.”
Lanning stayed the night in Pittsburgh with the hope that he could talk to someone the next day. He had already traveled that far and wasn’t going to go home without at least meeting someone face-to-face.
“When you drive 13 hours, you’re gonna wait until you can meet with somebody,” Lanning said. “So I waited and met with coach (Keith) Patterson, the defensive coordinator there and now the head coach at Abilene Christian. He said, ‘we’ve got a job and it’s $800 a month.’
“I don’t think I told him that my wife was pregnant and we had a one-year-old because I didn’t want them to not offer me a job. So that was kind of my foot in the door. Started there and I was able to take off from there, be around some really elite coaches and have some fun in that process.”
That was all Lanning needed to jumpstart his career. From Pittsburgh he went to Arizona State as a graduate assistant and remained for two seasons. He used his experience there to land his first full-time job at Sam Houston State coaching defensive backs.
However, Lanning would only one season there before getting a phone call from the legendary Nick Saban asking him to join the staff at Alabama as a graduate assistant. That was an opportunity he simply couldn’t afford to turn down, even if it meant less money at the time.
“I still have the voicemail saved in my phone from coach Saban when he called,” Lanning said. “That’s one of those ones you don’t ever delete. He called and had an opportunity to go be a GA. I went and interviewed, but to go and be a GA and Alabama, for me it was never about chasing the dollars. It was about chasing the opportunity.”
Lanning got to work with several future head coaches on that staff including Kirby Smart, Lane Kiffin and Billy Napier. The Crimson Tide won the national championship that season, giving Lanning the opportunity to soak up countless lessons from some of the brightest minds in the game.
From there, he was able to earn a full-time job as the inside linebackers coach at Memphis from 2016-17. He got another big break in 2018 when Smart, who had become the head coach at Georgia, brought him on as a linebackers coach for the Bulldogs.
Lanning was promoted to defensive coordinator the following season and would go on to coach Georgia into the No. 1 defense in the country by 2021. He was a part of a national championship that year before accepting the head coaching job at Oregon.
He credits that rise up the ladder to his stop in Tuscaloosa, which allowed him to connect with so many up-and-coming names as well as learn from Saban
“It probably ended up being the best decision in my career of picking a place where I wanted to go where I could learn, be around great people, be around great players,” Lanning said. “I got to be on a staff there with Kirby Smart, Mario Cristobal, Lane Kiffin, Billy Napier, Mel Tucker. It was just an elite group and then obviously Nick Saban. So getting to coach with some of those guys and be in a staff like that, we won a championship that year. It probably propelled my career bigger than anything I did.”
Lanning has gone an impressive 22-5 in his first two seasons with the Ducks, including 12-2 this past season with a Fiesta Bowl victory to cap it all off. It’s clear he’s now a coach on the rise, but he wouldn’t have gotten here if he wasn’t willing to go the extra mile all those years ago.