LOS ANGELES – If I’m in any way affiliated with the USC or UCLA football programs, I pray that Dan Lanning’s viral quote early this year proves to be a sharp Nike-level marketing gambit and not a sincere statement of fact.
But he probably did mean it.
“The grass is damn green in Eugene,” he said, shooting down rumors – in his most Dan Lanning way – that he was interested in leaving his post as Oregon’s head coach for the same job at Alabama.
He’s right, you know. I lived in Eugene; it rains a lot there. The grass is really green.
Plus the Ducks have Uncle Phil. Phil Knight, former Nike CEO, Oregon alumnus and Duck Super Fan, he’s steady watering their recruiting crops and portal pastures with what feels to others like “unlimited” NIL funding.
That’s not to say that Oregon will have bought this historic national championship, if the No. 1 Ducks (13-0) go on to beat No. 6 Ohio State (11-2) on Wednesday at the Rose Bowl in their College Football Playoff quarterfinal and then can win twice more after that.
But it does mean there are advantages to coaching at Oregon, and what we can say for sure about the 38-year-old Lanning is that every hint of an edge you give the guy, he’s going to use it.
Everyone knows about the decisive 12-man on the field penalty that helped Oregon run time off the clock very late into their 32-31 victory over Ohio State back in October. That we assumed it was intentional reflects what we think of Lanning – that he’s one clever, cunning son of a gun.
But what about what went down at Wisconsin on Nov. 16?
Oregon was trailing by seven points entering the fourth quarter when the sellout home crowd of 76,298 started jumping around to House of Pain’s “Jump Around,” as is common practice there between the third and fourth quarters at Camp Randall Stadium.
Breaking from tradition: The Ducks danced too. Every dang Duck. From defensive backs to the equipment managers to coaches, they all inexplicably started and bopping and bobbing and bouncing. The Duck mascot brought out a pogo stick, for goodness sake.
“You’re losing. Why are you celebrating? Why are you buying into their tradition?” Oregon student reporter Brady Ruth said he wondered at the time. “Because we know Dan Lanning has said in Eugene, ‘I don’t want our guys jumping to ‘Shout’ unless we’re up by 30.’ It’s focus on the game and lock in. So to see them dancing to ‘Jump Around’ while they’re losing, it was like, Dan Lanning is gonna kill somebody.
“But then we found out after the game, he told them to do that. I was like, this guy’s a psychopath.”
Or a master motivator. Someone with a heightened understanding of the human spirit. A people-who-care-about-people person. Because that remarkable dissonance – the visitors, backs against the wall, outnumbered thousands to one, stealing momentum by owning the moment meant to motivate the home team and crowd – worked.
Oregon outscored the Badgers 10-0 in the fourth quarter, and won 16-13, a Pac-12 Conference descendant proving what’s possible in the Big Ten while the L.A. schools struggled to stay right-side up in college football’s new world order.
“We had a mindset going into the game of what that song was going to mean for us,” Lanning told reporters in Madison. “Kind of like Pavlov’s dog, right? When you hear that song, it means it’s time to go.”
Everything little thing he does is calculated, said Joe Krasnowski, who covers Lanning as an Oregon Daily Emerald sports reporter. Every little thing he says is intentional, agreed Ruth, the Emerald’s sports editor.
And so it was with that in mind that I observed Lanning during his joint news conference Tuesday morning, a foggy final day of 2024 at the Sheraton Grand hotel in downtown L.A.
Seated at the dais beside Ohio State’s head coach Ryan Day, Lanning scanned the rows of reporters like a quarterback going through reads. Sure, this was a couple of head coaches in suits and ties the color of their respective schools saying all the right things, but it was also interesting to note when Lanning jumped in to answer first.
Like when the coaches were asked about the modern college football landscape and Lanning launched into a recruiting pitch before Day could respond: “I’ve always felt Oregon is about innovation. I talked about adapting as a really important trait right now in college football and … I’m glad to be in a place that’s on the forefront of that.”
Or when they were asked about reports that Florida State men’s basketball players are suing their head coach for unkept NIL promises, Lanning went first, first saying that particular situation was the furthest thing from his mind but also, by the way: “Growing up in the Midwest, you have to be a man of your word. What you say is what you have to do, I think that’s something we believe here at Oregon.”
And when the topic had to do with Wednesday’s on-field chess match – the type of questions that get reporters skewered by the sometimes-snarky Lanning – he let Day do the honors: “Want me to just give him the game plan?” Lanning would’ve liked that, he said: “I’ll start taking notes.”
This season, Lanning has been called a “mastermind” and a “superstar” and “Belichickian.”
A dad and a dreamer, he’s also an aggressive goal-setter who was propelled by the notion that he should be a head coach by 35.
He was so driven, in fact, that when he was a 24-year-old teacher and assistant football coach at Park Hill South High School in Kansas City, he got off work one January afternoon and drove 13 hours overnight to Pittsburgh to apply for a position – any position – on the Pitt coaching staff under new head coach Todd Graham, whom Lanning had met at coaching clinics.
Graham let him volunteer. And Lanning didn’t look back. He’s since coached at Arizona State, Sam Houston State, Alabama, Memphis, Georgia and, now, at Oregon, where in 2021 he was named the program’s 35th head coach, replacing Mario Cristobal after he left for Miami.
Since then, Lanning has lost five games and won 35 – and has reportedly earned an extra $850,000 in bonuses this season on top of his $7 million base pay. A relative bargain, if you think about it.
That’s why his name came up when there was an Alabama opening, and why he’ll continue to be tied to NFL jobs that open up – moves that would curtail the empire he could yet build in Eugene. And wouldn’t that be just fine with the Trojans and Bruins, neither of whom have beaten Lanning’s Ducks, who followed them into the Big Ten and proceeded to continue with business as usual.
Lanning, of course, says he isn’t leaving. That he and his family like Eugene, where the feeling is mutual, as assuredly as the grass is green.