How Dan Lanning Turned a Cross-Country Quest Into a College Football Career

Unannounced and uninvited, the aspiring college football coach road-tripped to Pitt in 2011 looking for his shot. 11 years later, he is finally a head coach.

Dan Lanning was sitting in his Chevy Cobalt in the parking lot outside the University of Pittsburgh football offices. It was 6 a.m. on a January morning in 2011, and Lanning was there to pursue a dream. He arrived unannounced and uninvited, on a crazy cross-country quest to become a Division I college football coach.

Lanning had driven through the night from Liberty, Mo., to Pittsburgh, a trek of some 13 hours. He’d stopped at a Love’s Gas Station near the end of the journey and changed into a suit. He had a thin strand of a connection at Pitt and was gambling that he could build it into a bridge if given a chance.

“It didn’t make a lot of sense,” Lanning told Sports Illustrated in November. “But it made all the sense in the world to me, trying to get my foot in the door."

Nearly 11 years later, Lanning has kicked down that door and barged into one of the better jobs in his chosen field. At age 35, he was hired Saturday by Oregon as its new head coach after a stellar run coordinating a record-setting defense at Georgia. He’s come a long way since rolling up at Pitt, amped on caffeine and ambition.

Lanning was 24 years old at the time, a graduate of William Jewell College. He’d played linebacker at the NAIA school and was working as an assistant coach at Park Hill South High School—not a bad entry-level job in the profession. But Lanning and his wife, Sauphia, had a 1-year-old son, Caden, and she was pregnant with their second child. He was feeling some urgency to break into college coaching.

Lanning and the Park Hill South staff had attended clinics at Tulsa the previous two years, where Todd Graham was the head coach. He made a passing acquaintance at those clinics with Graham’s defensive coordinator, Keith Patterson. When Lanning started peppering the college coaching world with emails looking for entry-level jobs, Patterson had been the only one to write back.

Then Graham and his staff moved Pittsburgh, which was enough for Lanning to jump in the car and head east. He called his old William Jewell teammate Trent Figg en route to telling him what he was doing, and that he wasn’t coming back without a job.

“I’m going to regret this forever if I don’t do it,” Lanning told himself as he drove through the night in Interstate 70.

Problem was, that parking lot at the Pitt offices were empty on that early Friday morning in January 2011. And it stayed empty for a couple of hours. That didn’t make any sense to Lanning.

“There’s no way these guys are going to be coming in at 10 a.m.,” he thought to himself. “They just took this job.”

Unbeknownst to Lanning, Graham and his staff were elsewhere attending a clinic. When a staffer finally did show up, Lanning waited for him to unlock the door and then followed him inside.

Once there, he approached the receptionist and asked for Patterson’s phone number. She declined to provide it. Lanning eventually found someone who gave him Patterson’s digits, and he called to explain why he was in Pittsburgh. Patterson told him the staff would be in the office the following day, so Lanning got a hotel room and showed up again in the morning.

More impressed than alarmed by this brash young intruder, Graham offered Lanning a quality control job paying $800 a month—not much, but precisely the foot in the door he was seeking. Then a graduate assistant position opened up during the summer. When Graham and staff moved to Arizona State after just one season, Lanning went with them. In his second season there, Lanning was elevated to on-campus recruiting coordinator and his career path was set.

Brett Davis/USA TODAY Sport

After spending 2014 coaching defensive backs and serving as recruiting coordinator at Sam Houston State, an FCS program, Lanning made another momentous move—he took a step down to eventually take a leap forward. Lanning went back to the grad assistant role, but this time it was at Alabama.

That’s where he met Kirby Smart, the Crimson Tide’s defensive coordinator. Lanning didn’t have an office, just a desk on the side of a staff room, but he made his presence felt quickly.

“Every day was competition,” Lanning recalled. “You’re not just competing to win games, you’re competing with other GAs for a job. There was no job that was too small or too big. I think coach Smart recognized that. He recognized hard work.”

Said Smart: “He was really consistent in his effort. He tried to go above and beyond. It’s always good when you give somebody a job and they do it to the fullest extent.”

Being part of a Saban staff during a national championship season has a way of opening doors, and after that Lanning was on his way to Memphis to coach inside linebackers and again coordinate recruiting. After two seasons there, Smart hired him away to Georgia and promoted him to defensive coordinator in 2019, after Mel Tucker left that job to be the head coach at Colorado. Tucker tried to hire Lanning, but he chose to stay and run a defense that was in the process of becoming elite.

Lanning’s coaching had a lot to do with that. It can be difficult tell where Smart’s coaching ended and Lanning’s began, since Smart has a defensive pedigree, but he’s made his own impact in terms of scheme and player motivation.

When Georgia surrendered 127 rushing yards in the second week of this season to UAB, Lanning had shirts made for the defensive staff to wear the next week with that number on them. That was the visual reminder that the Bulldogs could be better than what they showed.

“That bothers our players,” Lanning said. “They have a high standard of performance. So often, teams can’t handle criticism. They can’t handle hearing what they did wrong.”

Toward that end, Mondays were “visits to the doctor” for the Georgia defense. They examined their ailments and then set about curing them. But Lanning always made sure to start the list of ailments with what he could have done better before moving to the players.

“Coaches can be quick to blame the player,” he said. “If you’re going to point fingers, you better start by pointing that thumb back at yourself.”

There was certainly some thumb pointing for Lanning and the rest of the Georgia defense after being stunningly strafed by Alabama and Bryce Young in the Southeastern Conference championship game. But the Bulldogs were so far ahead of the rest of the nation that they remain No. 1 in fewest points allowed per game, at 9.5, which is 5.5 points fewer than runner-up Clemson.

Lanning will remain with the Georgia staff for the College Football Playoff, although the Saturday night statement from Smart was curiously worded: “While he will coach with us for the upcoming College Football Playoff, we will move forward with Glenn Schumann and Will Muschamp as co-defensive coordinators.” We’ll see whether that means Lanning will not be the defensive play-caller when the Bulldogs meet Michigan in the Orange Bowl.

Whenever Georgia’s season ends—on New Year’s Eve or on Jan. 10 in the College Football Playoff championship game—it will be off to Eugene. There will assuredly be a private jet ready to whisk him away across the country. Dan Lanning’s days of burning up the interstate in search of a foot in the door are long behind him now.