When Dan Lanning was introduced as the head coach of the Oregon football team in December 2021, he made it perfectly clear that in his mind, this job with the Ducks was by no means a stepping stone to something bigger or better. In Lanning's mind, he had just landed one of the premier coaching positions in the country.
“I’m going to stay at Oregon as long as I can stay at Oregon and as long as Oregon will have me,” Lanning said during his introductory press conference (h/t James Crepea of The Oregonian). “This is a premier job in the nation, not just this league, in the nation. It was going to take a premier job for me to leave the situation I was in. I’m thrilled to be here because I know what we can do here. There doesn’t have to be a next step for me. This job can be the final step.”
Just a little over two years later, Dan Lanning's word was put to the test for the first time, when the Alabama football program suddenly and surprisingly had a head coaching opening following Nick Saban's retirement. Before you could say the words “Roll Tide,” Lanning's name was already being mentioned as one of Alabama's primary targets to replace Nick Saban, but Lanning proved to be a man of his word, staying at Oregon and letting the Tide poach Kalen DeBoer away from the Ducks' Pac-12 foil Washington.
Now, as the Oregon Ducks prepare for their first season in the Big Ten, Lanning sat down with Fox Sports' Joel Klatt to discuss a number of topics, including why the Oregon coach decided to stay in Eugene rather than returning to Alabama, where he spent one season earning his “doctorate in football” as a graduate assistant back in 2015.
“I think it’s more about what exists [at Oregon],” Lanning explained to Klatt. “For me, it’s the first time in my career I feel like I’m somewhere I can be for a really, really, long time for and my family and I think that’s number one. I can also never take for granted that Oregon took a chance on me and that means a lot to me. There’s things I want to accomplish here that I haven’t accomplished yet. I never like leaving a place where I feel like there’s something left on the table and there’s a lot left on the table here at Oregon.”
Dan Lanning hopes to bring championship pedigree to Oregon
Dan Lanning is only 38 years old and had no head coaching experience under his belt when Oregon hired him two and a half years ago, but in a short amount of time as an assistant coach, Lanning won a pair of National Championships with two different SEC powerhouses. The first came in 2015, during the aforementioned “doctorate” season under Nick Saban at Alabama. The second came six years later, when Lanning won a title as the defensive coordinator at Georgia, less than a month after he had accepted the head coaching job at Oregon.
Though Dan Lanning stopped short of promising a National Championship during his introductory press conference, he danced around the topic enough to know that the thought of bringing the first National Title to Eugene was something that was already on his mind.
“This program is staged to compete and to win championships,” Lanning said confidently. “We won’t shy from expectations and our goal is to compete for national championships here.”
In the two seasons since, Lanning has compiled a 22-5 record, which includes a win in the Fiesta Bowl last year. But for a program with the prestige and resources of Oregon, a Fiesta Bowl victory isn't the end goal. A National Championship is the end goal, and while Dan Lanning knows how difficult that journey is, he told Joel Klatt that he believes he has the pieces to do so at Oregon.
“To accomplish winning a championship, it's so hard. It takes a lot of things working the right way. But it also takes a level of skill, it takes talent, it takes a team. And I think all of those things can exist here.”
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