A wall in the childhood home of Dan Lanning has flags of each of the college programs he's worked for.

Third of three parts | Part 1 | Part 2

If Dan Lanning’s path to Pittsburgh didn’t make logical sense, at least the location did.

Pittsburgh, the city known for steel mills and paper, for Primanti Brothers and Heinz, and whose defining trait is a blue-collar work ethic, would be the first stop in Lanning’s climb through the college football coaching ranks.

Now 11 years later, Lanning has ascended to become the youngest head coach in the Power Five with the Oregon Ducks and will debut against his former team and the reigning national champion Georgia Bulldogs at 12:30 p.m. Saturday at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta (TV on ABC).

Lanning played or coached football for 15 years by the time he got into the college ranks as a defensive quality control intern at Pittsburgh.

His determination and drive, figuratively and literally, got him into the door. He was about to find out how little he actually knew about the game he loved and wanted to make his life’s calling.

“Everything early in my career, I was winging it,” Lanning said. “I think the difference is, at the time, I didn’t realize I was winging it. Now I know I was, but at the time I thought I knew everything. I didn’t realize I didn’t know anything until I started coaching college ball at Pitt.”

It’s fitting, then, that Lanning was at Pittsburgh, home of the Cathedral of Learning.

Even at the bottom of the ladder in the world of hyper-competitive coaches, work ethic means something and Lanning burned the midnight oil, especially during his first six months on the job.

Wife Sauphia initially stayed in Missouri until their second son, Kniles, was born, and Lanning spent many evenings at Pitt’s facility before his family arrived.

“I would say, ‘Dan, here’s what I need,’ and he literally would sleep in my office and he would stay up there all night long and he slept on the floor,” said Keith Patterson, Pitt’s defensive coordinator at the time. “He would sleep inside the classroom and every morning I’d know that he probably was going to be in there and he would scare me.”

When head coach Todd Graham, Patterson and the defensive staff installed their scheme, Lanning was tasked with putting together the PowerPoint slides for meetings.

Patterson would give Lanning a list of text and maybe some bullet points. The next day he’d get back a visual presentation with graphics, photos and slogans.

“When it was talking about work ethic in our playbook, he would have a background of steel mill workers,” Patterson said. “I’ve still got the playbook — ‘The beast from the East’ — he put all these sayings on there. I didn’t tell him to do any of that. I just said, ‘Man, look, here’s the keys to victory. Here’s the keys to championship-level defense.’ Then this guy would take it to a whole other level.”

Coaches would walk into their offices each morning and whatever videos they needed for the day were done.

“They didn’t have to lift a finger, those coaches just had to walk in, grab their clicker,” Patterson said. “He did every bit of it by himself.

“He outworked every man in that building. There’s no way that you can humanly possibly work more hours than what he did. Yes, there are a lot of people that work hard in this industry, but you could say there’s something different about this guy. You could sense it from the word go. He’s so driven and the work ethic and he loves people and that magnetic personality that people want to be around him.”

By the summer of 2011, Sauphia had moved with the boys and the financial reality of Lanning’s career gamble became even more harsh than his $800 a month pay.

They had tried to sell the house at 913 Elizabeth Street in Liberty, Missouri, which Lanning bought and lived in with so many of his college teammates while they were in school and in the two-plus years after, but the house he bought in 2006 before the 2008-09 housing crisis now had loan terms that were no longer tenable.

The house was foreclosed on and Lanning went bankrupt.

During the course of the year, Lanning was technically promoted from quality control intern to a graduate assistant, working with the team’s defensive backs, and he helped Pitt recruit in the Northeast.

His first assistant coaching experience at the college level came at the end of that season, when Graham left for Arizona State and several assistant coaches followed with him immediately, while others went to Arizona with Rich Rodriguez.

“We didn’t have anyone that had ever called the offense,” said Patterson, who served as interim head coach for Pitt’s bowl game against SMU in the BBVA Compass Bowl in Birmingham, Alabama. Lanning and several graduate assistants served as interim position coaches.

There was a sophomore defensive lineman on that Pitt team named Aaron Donald.

“They had five coaches within a year and it’s just not fair to the players,” Lanning said. “Keith handled it well. The players were resilient. We lost that bowl game to SMU (28-6). I remember that well, June Jones. It was good experience for a young coach.”

Patterson joined Graham at Arizona State and they offered Lanning another GA job, this time working with the outside linebackers.

It was there that Dan began making a list of coaches he’d hire when he became a head coach.

“We’ve had a lot of GAs who have worked hard, that have done this and that, but I guarantee you there’s a lot of those guys that aren’t formulating lists,” Patterson said. “I told him, ‘You have what it takes to be the next Nick Saban.’ I don’t just say that. His desire and the way he tries to learn and study the game of football, recruiting, his organizational skills, his people skills, that’s what’s going to make him successful and then he’s going to surround himself with people with those same characteristics.”

Arizona State is where Lanning first met Joe Lorig, then ASU’s cornerbacks coach and special teams coordinator, whom he later hired to coach Oregon’s nickel safeties and special teams.

He also met Kenny Dillingham, then the quarterbacks coach and offensive coordinator at nearby Chaparral High School. Dillingham was one of Lanning’s first hires at Oregon.

The Lannings rented two different apartments two miles north of ASU’s football facility along Scottsdale Road. Dan rode a bike to work, until it was stolen when the garage door was left open. So he walked.

He and Sauphia’s third son, Titan, was born during their two years in Tempe, the second of which Lanning served as on-campus recruiting coordinator.

“They found a way to survive with Coach Lanning riding a bike to work,” Dillingham said. “That’s who he is, that’s how Sauphia is, that’s who their family is. They’re going to do whatever it takes for each other. It was super motivating and that’s what a family should look like.”

Lanning didn’t want to be on the support staff, he wanted an on-field coaching position. And with three young boys, there was urgency to find a full-time position and better salary, or at least a position that would put him one step away from it.

Sam Houston State was where he’d land that opportunity, coaching defensive backs for one season. There he met Matt Powledge, then the running backs coach and special teams coordinator. Powledge was Lanning’s first defensive assistant hired at Oregon, where he’s coaching safeties.

But Lanning learned that FCS coaches ran in different circles than FBS coaches. If he was going to become an assistant coach at the Power Five level, he needed to get back there.

He called Glenn Schumann, then a graduate assistant at Alabama, to see if it was possible to get an interview — for another GA job.

“I still have more football to learn and people to learn from, and that was the Mecca of football at the time, especially defensive football,” Lanning said. “To me it wasn’t a decision. Step backwards to move forwards. That’s always been my thought is don’t chase the dollars, chase the opportunity, and that was the best opportunity.”

Lanning told his father, Don, that going to Alabama would be like “getting your PhD in football.”

Lanning’s fourth college destination meant a fifth move in six years, not only for him but also Sauphia and two of their three sons. And he wasn’t receiving any benefits while in Tuscaloosa.

“Every time I made money in my career, I saved all of it so I could take another job that didn’t make sense,” Lanning said. “When I made $55,000 to $60,000 at Sam Houston State, but we lived on like we were making $20,000. That way if a GA job like Alabama came, then we could go take that job and not have to figure out how we were going to make it work. It’s the same thing, pulling out your teacher’s retirement to go be a GA at Pitt.”

Thatcher called Lanning, incredulous about him taking a demotion in order to be there, though. So did Patterson.

“When he left to go to Alabama to be a defensive analyst for Nick Saban, I’m going, ‘This guy has lost his mind,’” Patterson said. “I said, ‘You worked your tail off, you just got a full-time job and now you’re going to Alabama to kind of just jump right back into a support-staff role.’ But man, I was wrong on that.”

Alabama was where Lanning crossed paths with not only Saban, but some of the top recruiters and coaches in college football on one of the best college coaching staffs ever assembled.

Kirby Smart, Lane Kiffin, Mario Cristobal, Billy Napier, Mel Tucker, Bobby Williams, Bo Davis, Burton Burns and Tosh Lupoi, whom Lanning hired as Oregon’s defensive coordinator.

“Probably the more amazing part is, (Sauphia) was like, ‘OK, let’s do it,’” said Nick Persell, one of Lanning’s childhood friends and high school and college teammates. “She’s letting him follow his dream. I’ve heard him say before that was the best decision he ever made because that’s how he met Kirby.”

Alabama went on to win the national championship.

Mike Norvell was hired at Memphis in December 2015 and he offered Lanning his first FBS assistant coaching opportunity in 2016.

“Dan was always a guy that kind of stuck out to me,” Norvell told the Memphis Commercial-Appeal at the time. “I always knew that if I had an opportunity to be a head coach, Dan was going to be a guy that I wanted on my staff.”

He reunited with Norvell at a third school and reconnected with Lorig, Dillingham and coordinators Chip Long and Chris Ball.

Less than seven months into the job, Lanning’s life was turned upside down.

After going home to Richmond, Missouri, for July 4th, Dan and Sauphia went to Seattle for Lupoi’s wedding when Sauphia began experiencing severe knee pain.

“I was like, ‘Babe, you’re fine, take a Tylenol, you’re fine, it’s not a big deal,’” he said. “We had been to the doctor once and the doctor had said, ‘Yeah, did you used to play soccer in high school?’ She said, ‘Yeah, my knee bothers me, but it’s not from playing soccer.’ We kind of dismissed it.

“We got back to Memphis, I was at a coaches retreat, and she went to urgent care and said my knee is killing me and they immediately rushed her — they recognized something was wrong and they had to get it looked at and diagnosed it.”

Sauphia had osteosarcoma, a rare, aggressive form of bone cancer. Her leg was extremely swollen and she needed to begin aggressive chemotherapy that August.

“Sucked the air right out of your lungs,” Don Lanning said. “A lot of questions and the first few days, didn’t know the answers to a lot of them. It was devastating news to hear. In your mind, you’re thinking, how is this even possible, she’s 28, 29. It was heartbreaking and it was hard to breathe.”

About the same time, Lanning’s mother, Janis, had surgery for a benign brain tumor in late July.

Trent Figg, one of Lanning’s college teammates and housemates who was then the defensive coordinator at William Jewell College, and his wife, Tori, drove from Liberty, Mo. to Memphis to help.

Norvell paid for a nanny to watch Caden, Kniles and Titan and told Lanning he was barred from coming to the office late and during a team retreat late in fall camp.

“That was crazy for me, but he wanted me to be there for her, which was awesome,” Lanning said. “I love work, I enjoy it. It put things in perspective, it’s not fair for my wife and my kids for me to live at the office and not put time into them. There is a work-life balance and they can be a part of your work, too. My family is pretty involved in recruiting and helping.”

Sauphia had surgery that October. Doctors removed a tumor the size of a golf ball in her leg, then she underwent chemotherapy until May 2017.

“The way Coach Lanning would come to work every day, he’d leave home at lunch, go see Sauphia, go see the kids, the kids would be up and around,” Dillingham said. “The definition of who that family is.”

It was a community effort to help the Lannings through that football season. Their relatives and friends would visit for weekends or a week at a time and the wives of the Memphis coaches all helped out on a daily basis.

“This isn’t a job, this is our lives,” Lorig said. “All the wives are very, very close. There was a really tight-knit wives group at Memphis, and when Sauphia was going through her cancer they all had different days they would take food over, they’d get together and package meals and take her to her treatments.

“I knew Dan would be a good husband and good father in the first place because that’s who he is and supporting his wife the way I think any of us would.”

Dan, Sauphia and their football family at Memphis celebrated the end of her chemo treatments on May 8, 2017.

“They’re like a second family, because everywhere we go, we don’t have family where we’re at,” Sauphia Lanning told the Memphis Commercial-Appeal at the time. “They’ve done nothing but make me feel loved throughout this whole process. I don’t even have words to express how thankful I am for them.”

After that fall, Smart called Lanning and offered him a job coaching outside linebackers at Georgia.

“I had a great relationship with Dan when he worked at the University of Alabama and had a lot of respect for the way he went about his work,” Smart said. “He didn’t try to be somebody he wasn’t. He didn’t try to impress people. He just worked and he grinded and he really did a good job of doing what you asked him to do.”

The move to Georgia came with an upgrade in compensation, and Dan and Sauphia bought a house for the first time since Elizabeth Street.

After the 2018 season, Tucker was hired at Colorado and offered Lanning the defensive coordinator job. He turned it down to take over that role with the Bulldogs.

“I knew he was going to do a great job,” Smart said. “Schumann was here at that time as well, and he and Schumann were really neck-and-neck the whole time and both took on responsibilities. Dan would be the first to tell you he would have never had the success here he had, had it not been for Glenn Schumann.”

Lanning recruited many of Georgia’s players who have since gone on to the NFL and led a defense that put up historic results over the last three years.

He was twice named a finalist for the Broyles Award as the nation’s top assistant coach, typically a fast track to a head coaching job after one such recognition.

He interviewed last December at Oklahoma, which ended up hiring Brent Venables, and then Oregon opened when Cristobal left for Miami.

Friends were told to stay silent, especially after the Oklahoma ordeal.

Then came the signal: A duck emoji.

“I was in Las Vegas with some of the guys that are in our booster club here,” said Persell, now the coach at Richmond High School. “So we’re all standing around the Circa casino on Fremont Street and watching the big TVs and across the ticker was ‘Dan Lanning new head coach at Oregon.’

“We’re all Richmond guys and those guys are older than me, they would have been guys that played on the ′95 team here, which was a good team. They’re huge Richmond supporters and boosters and they care a lot about Richmond football, and they were blown away.”

Lanning hadn’t even called his parents yet when he FaceTimed Benny Palmer and Zach Cunningham, two of his college teammates who now coach at Park Hill South High School, as he, Sauphia and the boys were boarding the private jet to fly to Eugene.

“It was crazy that our roommate from William Jewell, from Richmond, that we hang out with and talk to every day, is about to be at the seat of the Oregon Ducks that we grew up watching,” Palmer said. “This is insane. The trajectory that it all took off from, and back it all up and we’re all hanging out, sitting in a dorm room.”

Less than 11 years after cashing out his teacher’s retirement of $18,000 to take an $800 per month quality control position at Pittsburgh, Lanning was now the youngest head coach in the Power Five and set to earn $4.6 million in the first year of a six-year deal worth more than $29 million.

Yet, he and Sauphia remain frugal, with little opulence. Their house near Destin, Florida, which has hosted some of the annual reunions of the Jewell Nine group, was purchased when they were at Georgia.

Even with an allowance for two vehicles payments in Dan’s contract, Sauphia drives the same car they bought when they lived in Memphis.

“We just kind of always have the philosophy of, we’ve been to rock bottom, so why would we ever put ourselves in a situation where we might be there again?” Lanning said. “Don’t live outside your means. It’s one thing we’ve certainly learned and it’s worked pretty well for us.

“You see coaches spend every dime they make and then you see coaches that don’t. We always said we wanted to be the people that didn’t and be the people that could be able to help other people. We never cared what vehicle we’re driving or what we had. It was never really about that.”

When Don and Janis visited Eugene for the first time in May, they took the grandsons to the Oregon coast. Sauphia gave each of the boys $5 from their allowance for a souvenir.

“Teaching the boys if you’re wanting that, then you’re going to have to save your money for it,” Janis Lanning said. “It’s the mindset of, ‘We don’t just do handouts, we don’t just buy the most expensive, we still shop at Costco.’ They don’t take it for granted and I’ve never heard him talk money. Some people I know would live on a mindset of, ‘Look, I’m rich.’ Money is not their object.”

They’re far more likely to spend on others than themselves.

When they went back to Richmond one summer, Don’s old recliner chair, while comfortable, was broken.

“When you pulled the lever, it would lean to the side,” Don said. “Before they lift Kansas City that summer, insisted that we go with them to the big furniture store in Kansas City and pick this (power recliner) out.”

When they visited Richmond this July and Dan was Daniel again for a few days because, as their doormat says, “There’s no place like Mama and Papa’s House,” he marveled at the new deck his brother David recently finished at home.

Dan also learned that in the office, where flags of each of the colleges he’s worked at hang on the wall, was a football he had recently signed for charity.

“Defeat Brain Tumors,” Dan wrote on the Oregon souvenir ball, which Don bought for Janis.

Don Lanning, father of Oregon coach Dan Lanning, bought a signed ball he donated to a charity for his wife Janis, Dan's mother, who had brain surgery in 2017.

Nearly nine months since he was hired on Dec. 11, the time has arrived for Lanning to make his head coaching debut.

“I think he’ll be a great success at Oregon,” said Arkansas coach Sam Pittman, who worked with Lanning while at Georgia. “I think he’s one of my best friends, but I think a whole lot of him as a person and a ball coach. He just cares. He’s a guy that, his players are going to play extremely hard for him because he loves them, he cares about them.”

While Lanning has spent the past month planning, scheming and evaluating players on the field, he’s incorporated things he’s learned along his coaching journey.

He’s referenced Jon Gordon’s “The Energy Bus” and other books during fall camp.

“I grew up, both of my parents were teachers. I’m always looking to become better,” he said. “I feel like you become stagnant as a coach and you aren’t looking to learn, then you’re missing out. There’s an opportunity to improve. Whether that be Gordon or whatever that might be. There’s a lot of books that I think you can get a lot out of. ‘Shoe Dog,’ right? That you can grab something from and carry it over and hopefully it translates to our players. If it’s a Malcolm Gladwell book or a Gordon book, I’m going to try to lean in on it.”

Lanning’s friends and family will be watching all across northwest Missouri on Saturday.

Trac Hendrix, who played with him in high school, is planning a cookout on his back patio to watch the game or maybe to go back to Richmond to be with Pete Castilleja and Persell.

Rob Bowers, their coach at Richmond, said Saturday is “as good as it gets for a high school football coach” and is more excited to watch Lanning coach Oregon against Georgia than Kansas City play in Super Bowl LIV.

Logan Minnick, Lanning’s former teammate at Richmond and William Jewell College, was angling for tickets as a good luck charm.

“I told him that I need to be there and I need to sit in the same seats because I’ve been down there twice when they played when he was at Georgia in the SEC championship, and I said Georgia does not win when I go to (Mercedes-Benz Stadium), so I probably should be there,” Minnick said. “But he said, ‘I can’t chance it. I don’t know if it’s that I don’t win when you’re there or if it’s Georgia doesn’t.’”

While Lanning has navigated the Ducks in preparing for the Bulldogs, those who helped shape him have reflected on how he’s gotten to the point of living out his dream, no matter how improbable or what it took along the way.

“I spent 52 years in the profession and just to know it works, that you have a desire and a discipline and you make it happen, makes you feel good,” said Fran Schwenk, Lanning’s coach at William Jewell College. “You know that all those years that you’ve been in it, encouraging young men to do just that and they do it, it gives me a sense of ‘we’ve been doing the right thing for all these years.’ Gives me a reinforcement of what I put my life into.”

These are the people and places that influenced Dan Lanning and made him the man and coach he is today, less than two days before kickoff in his first game as a college head coach against the program he helped lead to its first national championship in 41 years.

So now that he’s in the big chair at the head of the table, how does he define program?

“For me this is not just one person, one player, one coach, it’s an organization,” Lanning said. “This is an amoeba, it’s a unit, all things flowing through the university. The fan base, alumni, donor support. Everyone’s a piece of this. One doesn’t operate without the other.

“I think you need all those pieces together to be part of it.”

-- James Crepea reported from Richmond and Liberty, Missouri, and Eugene.

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