There are so many variables when it comes to first-year head coaches and their success in college football.
Can they manage a program? Do they have the necessary time management skills? Do they have the quick-thinking acumen to be a steady in-game coach and can they make necessary adjustments on the fly in adverse situations?
Are they able to learn from their mistakes and turn those mistakes into positive teaching moments for their team?
Can they recruit and turn average players into great players? Can they take those players and not only turn them into successful players but can they also mold those same players into men of character, teach them about life, about being good men, good husbands, and solid members of society?
And mostly, are they able to build a program with consistent messaging with effective pillars of success, do they have strong leadership and do they have the ability to remain grounded in their own personal lives?
There’s a laundry list of markers that point to the success of any head coach. Dan Lanning certainly has a significant amount of those markers, and then some.
This is why he’s the right man for Oregon and is headed for tremendous success in Eugene.
If you had any second thoughts about that, look no further than his Monday evening press briefing after a hugely heartbreaking loss to the Huskies.
“There are so many things that I wish I could go back and do differently,” explained Lanning on Monday.
“There’s some moments where I felt like I got a little selfish and looking for something that I felt like was there and really at the opportunity time, it wasn’t. And medicine doesn’t always taste good. That’s one thing we talked to our players about today. There were a lot of coaches drinking medicine yesterday on Sunday in that office and it doesn’t always taste good. But you better be able to accept it and attack it, and there’s a lot of things that I personally, as a coach, myself, that I can go do better.
“A lot of things that our coaching staff can do better and a lot of things that our players can do better. I think when you’re in an environment where it’s about growth, we’ve actually experienced something similar before where it didn’t go the way we wanted to go. Our guys attacked it really well and our coaches attacked it really well. The only thing I know to do, when something doesn’t go right, is to go to work and that’s kind of always worked for me.”
In a sport where head coaches aren’t always the most truthful, or honest, that’s about as open as one can get in the face of a disappointing defeat.
And Lanning wasn’t just offering coach-speak to provide good sound bites to the media. He actually went to work.
“Saturday night, when the game was over, as much as I felt like going in the back room and not spending any time with anybody, you know what I did? I went and recruited,” said Lanning.
“Then Sunday morning, I got my ass up really early and got every ounce of film graded and then did what? Some more recruiting and then did some evaluations of our performance and did a quality control report on what we can do better and how we can be better. Then that night, guess what we were doing more of? More recruiting and finding opportunities to make our program better, touching base with our players, looking for ways for us to grow.
“So again, the result was not what we wanted. You have to give them credit for doing a good job, and you have to look at. It’s called hard facts, man. It’s the hard truth. You got to look at the things that you could have done better as a coach to prepare our team and perform better in that environment. So a lot of opportunities for growth and I’m certainly gonna attack it.”
That’s someone to admire.
That’s someone who knows how to lead by example and put in the hard work so his players will follow and do the same.
Oregon is lucky to have Lanning.
His pure energy to succeed is real and so is his hatred for losing.
“I’m a bad loser, man,” explained Lanning when asked about his last 48 hours.
“I don’t ever handle it very well and something I can continue to grow at but that hasn’t changed since third grade PE class. I don’t like losing and I don’t like losing if I’m playing checkers against Titan, my nine-year-old right now. I want to win at everything that I do. Losing is always a lot harder than winning.
“The benefit of winning doesn’t compare close to the feeling of losing so I’m never going to be great at that. But I know this, we didn’t let Georgia beat us twice. I’m not gonna let Washington beat us twice. We played them once. And I’m not gonna let that happen. My focus is we gotta go play a really dang good Utah team and probably one of the most complete teams that we played this season. You’re not going to do that by crying over spilled milk.”
In more than 30 years of covering college football, I’ve never come across a head coach with as much candor and self-awareness and his willingness to allow outsiders into his world.
Now, that might change as Lanning’s coaching career moves forward.
But right now it’s a refreshing change to witness in such a volatile and high-dollar profession.
Oregon is lucky to have Lanning leading the Ducks program.
And we’re all lucky to be able to watch it.
MONDAY PRESSER; DAN LANNING TALKS ABOUT UW LOSS