Dan Lanning doubles down on future with Oregon ahead of Fiesta Bowl
Dan Lanning doubled down on his future with the Oregon Ducks on Saturday during a pre-Fiesta Bowl press conference.
Or maybe it was tripled down. Quadrupled? It’s hard to keep them all straight at this point. People keep asking the Ducks’ head coach if he wants to leave Eugene and he keeps knocking those questions out of the ballpark. A reporter — not recognized by local Oregon writers — asked Lanning on Saturday if Oregon is a place he wants to make his home.
“This will be my final job, as far as I’m concerned,” Lanning responded.
After he was linked to Auburn a year ago, Lanning was linked to the then-open Texas A&M job earlier this year. In both instances, he addressed rumors head-on and said Oregon was where he wanted to stay. The grass isn’t greener elsewhere, he has said, and the Ducks have everything he needs to compete for national championships.
Since, Lanning has taken the Ducks to the Pac-12 Championship — effectively a play-in game for the final four-team College Football Playoff — and signed the best recruiting class in school history.
Hard to argue with the results.
Lanning is under contract with Oregon through January 2030. He has a fixed buyout that doesn’t lessen over time — something he agreed to as a show of faith that he was committed to the Ducks.
“Oregon gave me an opportunity that no one else gave me to start there,” he said on Saturday. “They saw something in me that not necessarily anybody else saw. Beyond that, there was an opportunity at this place to do some things … I had everything in front of me as far as accomplishing the goals I want to accomplish.
“When you work with an administration like ours, a guy like (athletic director) Rob Mullens, you see the alignment within the university of the things you want to accomplish, all of those things exist at Oregon. Innovation. College football is changing so fast and Oregon is willing to be on the cutting edge when it comes to that.
“For me, I don’t take that lightly and I feel like I have unfinished business here. There’s a lot I want to accomplish here. Then, maybe more importantly than any of that, my kids, right? I have lived in eight different states. I’m tired of moving. You’ve got to change, like, license and all that stuff, all the time. It’s not fun and probably even less fun for my wife. We love Oregon. It’s been everything that we wanted. We get to coach great players and be around great people and it makes a lot of sense for us.”