On the road, in search of Dan Lanning — for 820 miles

RICHMOND, Mo. — A GPS isn’t needed in Dan Lanning’s hometown.

Looking for Richmond High School? Search for the stadium lights that rise above this town of 6,000 people an hour northeast of Kansas City.

It’s the type of place where a visitor from Oregon can walk into the school unannounced, poke his head into the front office, have a phone call placed and, a few minutes later, find the football coach cutting his lunch break short to meet.

Nick Persell grew up with the man who is now entering his fifth season as head coach of the Oregon Ducks. They went to elementary school together. They played football together at Richmond High, then again at William Jewell College, where, for a time, Lanning was also Persell’s landlord.

We walk through the gym and outside to the football stadium. It’s 87 degrees and the Missouri air sticks to everything. Kickoff is a week away and the long grass beneath us could someday become turf, a project Persell says Lanning has offered to help make happen.

From there, we step inside a dimly lit field house, part practice facility, part barn, with roughly a red zone’s worth of turf.

This is where Persell tells me about the drive.

The 13 hours on Interstate 70. The roughly 820 miles to Pittsburgh. The decision more than 15 years ago that has become part of the origin story of one of college football’s most successful young coaches.

Lanning was an assistant football coach at Park Hill South High School then, teaching elementary P.E. nearby and sending out résumés that largely went unanswered. He was married, had a young son and another child on the way. He had a football mind that won over Persell and their William Jewell teammates during late-night chalkboard sessions.

What he didn’t have was a way in.

Then, in January 2011, Lanning heard there might be an opening on Todd Graham’s new staff at Pitt. He knew defensive coordinator Keith Patterson from coaching clinics.

What if he just showed up?

So Lanning grabbed a suit, loaded up his car and told the guys at the house that he was leaving and not coming back without a job.

“We were all sitting in our living room, probably playing spades around the house and basically he’s like, ‘I’m driving to Pittsburgh,’” Persell says. “And we’re like, ‘Pittsburgh, Kansas?’”

No.

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

“And we’re like, ‘What are you going there for? What? Why?’”

Standing inside this humid barn, I had a similar question.

It had already been a productive 24 hours retracing Lanning’s origins in Missouri. Two weeks before a season that could define his Oregon tenure — the Ducks are No. 2 in the preseason polls with a Heisman Trophy candidate at quarterback and national title aspirations — I landed in Kansas City and took in a practice at Park Hill South.

I walked through a William Jewell campus no larger than University of Oregon’s athletic footprint.

I drove past the house on Elizabeth Street that Lanning bought in college. I peered through the glass cases lining Richmond High School hallways, where memorabilia from alums such as Lenvil Elliott and Harold “Hank” Burnine now shares space with a signed miniature Oregon helmet and a photo of Lanning’s family on the sideline at the national championship game he won with Georgia.

They’re talking about adding something more to commemorate Lanning’s rise.

It’s just happened so fast since that drive.

There was more than enough here for a story. I could knock out a couple more interviews. I could try to track down his parents. But my pitch wasn’t to profile Lanning. It was an attempt to understand him.

So I left Persell, got into my Kia Telluride and punched “Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania” into the GPS.

It was 2 p.m. when I cracked a Mountain Dew, turned east onto Interstate 70 and hit the road.

820 miles to Pittsburgh

If I really wanted to channel Dan Lanning, Persell told me I should listen to rap along the way.

“When we were kids, someone would make a beat and he would just freestyle,” Persell said before I left.

“Was he any good?” I asked.

“Oh, he was the best.”

So Eminem it was as I embarked on a drive that would take me through five more states, one time zone and, if Google Maps could be trusted, spit me out in Pittsburgh sometime around 2 a.m.

That directly violated the only real condition my boss attached to the trip.

“Please don’t drive through the night,” Dann Miller said.

I figured that was a fair concession for getting a ridiculous trip approved.

It had only been a week since I semi-jokingly pitched him on the story after hearing Lanning recount the drive, again, on the “Pardon My Take” podcast.

Lanning recorded that interview from Chicago at Big Ten Media Days. His day at the Hilton was packed with walk-and-talks with national writers, a speech to the room, television interviews and podcast appearances, most of them asking some version of the same question:

Is this finally the year you win a national title?

It would be an annoying question if it weren’t so fair.

At 40, Lanning is 48-8 at Oregon. He’s won a Big Ten championship, the Fiesta and Orange bowls, led the Ducks through a perfect regular season and has now been with the program longer than any head coach since Mike Bellotti. Oregon has made the College Football Playoff in consecutive seasons and both trips ended in convincing losses.

Dante Moore is back. The defensive line is back.

So are the expectations.

Is this finally the year?

Lanning had spent hours answering some version of that question by the time I got my scheduled 15 minutes with him. He can be a challenging interview, as I recounted last year, and we finished after eight.

Then I saw the clip of Lanning cutting jokes about Zyns with Pat McAfee of ESPN. Then I heard him happily recounting “The Drive” to guys named Big Cat and PFT Commenter.

I left Chicago self-conscious.

Lanning is the first Oregon coach I’ve covered who’s close to my age. I thought I’d find better rapport with him than I did with Mario Cristobal or Willie Taggart or Mark Helfrich.

I haven’t.

So I pitched a story born, at least partly, from that insecurity: I’d drive 820 miles in his shoes.

Maybe I would understand him better.

Two weeks after that pitch, driving east through the plains and cornfields of rural Missouri, something else from our interview sat in my head.

I had asked Lanning what it felt like after he won a national championship at Georgia. What was the next day like? He told me it was a little underwhelming. Winning the thing he’d spent his career chasing hadn’t quenched his thirst.

What happens if you win one at Oregon? I asked.

“Then the goalposts move,” he said. “And then you try to win two.”

The plains gave way to St. Louis, and I-70 curled north toward Illinois. It was 4:44 p.m. with the sun still beaming when I crossed the Mississippi and left Missouri behind.

A different path

The first hours flew by.

“The Marshall Mathers LP” segued into podcasts, which occasionally transitioned into miles of silence as I took in the Midwest.

I grew up in Alaska with scenery and terrain most would agree is more impressive than western Illinois. But I marveled anyway as I passed truck stops, every fast-food joint I’d ever known and a few massive crosses.

One, just outside Effingham, Illinois, stood 198 feet tall over the interstate and was conveniently located next to a trampoline park and a billboard informing me it was only 1,686 miles to Las Vegas — or just 18 miles to Exit 82 and Vegas Jacks video slots.

Hey, I knew of a guy who placed an 820-mile bet on a drive to Pittsburgh.

Actually, considering newsroom travel budgets, two of them.

I was flying.

I imagine Lanning was, too, over those first hours, while the adrenaline of what he was doing still coursed through his system.

Because Lanning risked a perfectly good life back in Missouri when he hit the road.

I saw what it could have looked like the day before when I drove to Park Hill South, where Lanning had been an assistant, and watched Justin Poncy’s Panthers prepare for their Class 6 season opener.

Poncy is in his fourth season at Park Hill South, where he teaches business education. His wife is a nurse practitioner, they have two young kids — their 4-year-old daughter was recently the grand marshal of the homecoming parade — and they’ve struck a nice balance between leading a football program at Missouri’s highest level and living a comfortable life outside Kansas City.

Poncy, too, knows something about taking a chance.

He played center at Ottawa University before transferring to Central Missouri and earning a business degree. He thought he was going to become the next Warren Buffett. Instead, he spent a couple years in the business world, hated it and slowly discovered that he belonged back on a football field.

He gave himself a goal of becoming a head coach within 10 years.

He got the Park Hill South job in year 9.

Poncy’s team is undersized. Good players on his roster get poached by private schools and, in an affluent part of town, he has plenty of players who like football and only a few who truly love it.

But he has a new weight room. The football stadium is being remodeled. His family lives seven minutes away. He makes a good living and, after three years of rebuilding, finally has a roster and staff that have allowed him to “look up and breathe.”

It’s a challenge.

It’s a dream.

Just not Lanning’s.

Around Kansas City high school football, Lanning has become something of a legend. He has returned for clinics, invited area coaches out to talk ball when he’s back in town and become the kind of coach whose ideas filter back into local practices.

Park Hill South now opens practice with “Fastball,” four rapid-fire plays of good-on-good borrowed from the Alabama/Georgia world Lanning came through — and a drill I remembered seeing during his early Oregon practices.

The question was whether coaches here viewed Lanning as an outlier or as proof there was a path.

Poncy has only been around Lanning a handful of times. But he knows the story. They all do. If he had an assistant wanting to do the same thing, if they were serious, Poncy said, “They have to go.”

“You can’t make the other shore with your foot on the near one,” he said. “The only way is you have to jump two feet in.”

But Poncy also understood the part of Lanning’s story that becomes easier to overlook once you know how it ends.

At some point, the sun goes down and the path forward isn’t so clear.

“You want to be the head coach at Oregon,” Poncy said, “but do you want to do all those things that it takes you to get to be the head coach of Oregon?”

I wondered if doubts crept in for Lanning as the miles behind him blended with the ones still ahead.

They did for me.

I was running an hour behind after stopping for beef jerky and to file a newsletter. By the time I left Illinois, the sun hung just above the horizon, and I only briefly smiled as I passed the World’s Largest Windmill.

I crossed into Indiana with darkness ahead.

The dark road

The Midwest became headlights, taillights and green signs announcing places I’d never been.

Terre Haute.

Little Point.

The unincorporated town of Alaska.

That last one was more than enough to send me into my own head for a while.

I carry a small-town chip on my shoulder and spent much of my career wanting the kind of trust that had put me on this interstate — an editor willing to let me take a swing without knowing exactly where the ball was going to land.

Things were comfortable now. I’m not used to that.

Maybe I’d reached my Park Hill South.

But was it Poncy’s? The place you work years to reach, look around and realize you have most of what you wanted?

Or was it Lanning’s? A good life that still couldn’t quiet the thought that something bigger might be waiting somewhere else?

I didn’t have an answer. And Indianapolis came and went while I thought about it.

Less than two years ago, Lanning had won a Big Ten championship in Indianapolis, capping a perfect regular season with one of the biggest wins of his career.

Now almost every conversation about him begins somewhere beyond it.

“I’m not a big fan of selfish goals,” Lanning said when I asked him in Chicago about the legacy he was building in Eugene. “There’s an ultimate goal that we haven’t accomplished yet, and that’s kind of what my focus is.”

But then what? 

At this part of the drive, I began to understand the power of an ultimate goal. There was part of me that wanted to stop in Indianapolis and grab a burger at the Workingman’s Friend, like I did when the Ducks were here for the Big Ten Championship.

But I would soon realize that too much time lingering in a memory would leave me ill-prepared for the road ahead. 

Pittsburgh was still 357 miles away.

Missouri was 482 miles behind.

The car kept moving. 

I wondered if Lanning ever had a moment like this — far enough from the life he knew that going back made less sense than continuing toward one he didn’t.

Into the flood

Out of my head, Ohio came with momentum.

I’d been here twice, enjoyed it each time and rolled into the Buckeye State thinking about my last trip — when a Kayvon Thibodeaux-less Oregon team, with Anthony Brown at quarterback, walked into the Horseshoe and stunned Ohio State 35-28.

Of course, the momentum didn’t last.

Three weeks after the biggest win of Mario Cristobal’s Oregon tenure, the Ducks lost at Stanford.

Lanning knew something about that, too.

In October 2024, Oregon beat Ohio State 32-31 at Autzen Stadium in a game that elevated Lanning even further into the hottest-young-coach-in-the-country conversation. Analysts spent days dissecting everything from Oregon’s execution to Lanning intentionally leaving 12 defenders on the field late to burn precious seconds off the clock.

“We spend an inordinate amount of time on situations and some situations don’t come up very often in college football, but this was obviously something we had worked on,” Lanning said afterward. “You can see the result.”

Through Columbus, I could begin to see the result, too.

Pittsburgh was only three hours away. Google Maps had me arriving around 2:45 a.m. and, to that point, the drive had produced few real problems. Outside of a little rush-hour traffic near St. Louis, my biggest setback had been missing Buc-ee’s.

I’ve never been, but I’ve heard it described as a 7-Eleven on steroids and have seen just about every serious college football writer post a picture from inside these hallowed grounds at one point or another.

It felt like a rite of passage.

The first billboard with the smiling beaver appeared back in Illinois, informing me I had only 314 miles to go.

Unfortunately, I was too focused on Pittsburgh to notice I’d missed the exit until I was roughly 330 miles beyond that first sign.

Whatever.

I had only 185 miles left.

That’s a Seattle drive.

I could do that in my sleep.

Then the floods came.

Oregon’s momentum after Ohio State eventually ran into its own wall. The Ducks’ unbeaten 2024 season ended with a 41-21 loss to the Buckeyes in the Rose Bowl. They regrouped in 2025, reached the playoff again and were flattened by Indiana 56-22 one game short of the national championship.

Mine was less dramatic.

At first.

Construction-induced — and, note to my boss, definitely not sleep-deprived — confusion sent me the wrong direction outside Columbus and forced nearly 20 miles of backtracking.

I corrected the mistake and got back up to speed on I-70. I was annoyed but still moving.

Then I saw the brake lights.

Then the water.

Sometime after midnight, I pulled into a gas station to fill up and learned that a historic flash flood had swept through Licking County two days earlier. I-70 was closed around Buckeye Lake, forcing eastbound traffic off the interstate and onto U.S. 40.

I probably should have read the news before my drive.

I considered my options.

I could turn around, get a hotel in Columbus and finish the drive in the morning. It would have been the safe choice. 

But would Lanning have done that?

No way.

So I climbed back into the Telluride and followed a line of semitrucks onto U.S. 40, through powerless one-street towns and past darkened businesses, hoping it wouldn’t be too long before the interstate opened back up.

Country roads

I had never been to West Virginia.

Frankly, I didn’t know the state was going to be part of the drive. But after I was spit back out onto I-70 and greeted with open dry lanes, I came upon the Mountain State around 2:55 a.m.

Before the drive, this was the part of the journey where I thought I was going to get deep. Lanning is an avid reader and has mentioned numerous times his affinity for “The Art of War.”

I had it saved to my Spotify playlist.

But it was here that I learned Spotify apparently has a monthly limit on audiobook listening time.

That was fine.

I had already made it through the storm.

Instead, I turned on John Denver and let West Virginia’s 14.45 miles of I-70 fly by like a short chapter.

I love those books.

At 3:10 a.m., with 54 miles to go, “Take Me Home, Country Roads” was interrupted by the most beautiful AI voice I’d ever heard:

“Welcome to Pennsylvania.”

The arrival

I wondered if Lanning thought about the drive after Penn State last year.

That was his reemergence on that stage. Nine months after the Ohio State debacle, the Ducks went into a White Out and beat No. 3 Penn State in double overtime — a win that meant so much to the coach that, on that same “Pardon My Take” podcast that helped inspire this drive, he was asked, “What were you on?” after celebrating so intensely.

“It was just juice, man,” Lanning said.

It was foggy that night when I drove from Penn State to Pittsburgh. And it had settled in again as I made my final miles to the city a year later, passing semis parked at rest stops to wait out the night.

In that final stretch, I found myself thinking about the journey.

Including my stop at William Jewell College.

I didn’t talk to anyone there. I sat in metal grandstands under the sun and watched the Cardinals work on kickoff returns.

There was nothing particularly impressive about it. Nothing that separated William Jewell from the dozens of small colleges I passed along my route to Pittsburgh. Most likely, nobody outside of Liberty, Missouri, will ever know these players.

But Lanning used to be one of them.

I held my breath for as long as I could as I entered the Fort Pitt Tunnel and emerged across the bridge into Pittsburgh.

Downtown was empty when I pulled up to a boutique hotel with no staff, just an aquarium greeting late-night check-ins.

I punched in the code to my room, was reminded by email that no late checkouts were available, wondered if the place Lanning stayed his first night in the city also had a bidet and climbed into bed at 4:10 a.m.

I needed some sleep.

The journey wasn’t quite done.

6 hours in Pittsburgh

The drive, of course, is only part of what made Lanning’s story work.

He got to Pittsburgh. Then he had to make it happen, with each obstacle and step providing its own story — maybe just a fraction less cinematically.

Lanning showed up at Pitt. The coaching staff wasn’t there.

So he hung around, making himself useful until they showed up.

“He basically got with one of the GAs that were walking around the office and just helped him do his work for the day,” Persell said. “I was like, ‘Who does that?’”

Lanning.

He eventually made enough of an impression to earn a quality-control job, then became a graduate assistant that summer.

He wasn’t that much different from his peers back in Missouri. Many of his old roommates — well, tenants — are now coaching high-level high school football back home.

Their dreams weren’t that different.

But Lanning was the one who seemed to understand that if his were bigger, the leaps had to match.

When head coach Graham left Pitt for Arizona State after the 2011 season, Lanning and his wife, Sauphia, and sons Caden and Kniles came with.

“I’ve always been fortunate enough to recognize opportunity,” Lanning said in 2022. “People have heard me say it before, but if you do something and you’re passionate enough, you’ll never feel like you work a day in your life. That’s why you get into a car to drive 13 hours to go sit in front of a coaching staff that you might not have an opportunity with.

“But the fact that you might, that’s enough for me.”

I came into this drive knowing how different I was from Dan Lanning.

And, I’ll admit, I woke up Friday morning in Pittsburgh realizing the same.

I’m pretty sure Lanning wouldn’t have confused his departure time for his arrival time, as I realized I had just before falling asleep.

My flight left at 11 a.m. I still needed to return the rental car and had yet to visit Pitt, where I had planned to spend the morning walking around campus and pestering anyone willing to listen with questions about whether they had ever heard of Dan Lanning.

That was a long shot.

I made an executive decision to cut the man-on-the-street portion of the visit and route my drive to the airport through campus instead.

It was move-in day. Hundreds of first-year students were arriving at the dorms with luggage and dreams in tow. I took in the scene, felt a mild sense of accomplishment and then realized I needed to get going.

I fired up the Telluride one last time and headed toward the airport, passing a sign for “Moon Township” along the way.

Thank God I don’t cover an astronaut, I thought, as I wrapped up my six hours in Pittsburgh.

Back home

After driving 820 miles across the Midwest, it’s been hard to get this story out of my mind.

Doubt had definitely crept in by the time I saw Lanning again Wednesday.

It was his final media availability before Boise State — an important game for the Ducks if they lose it, but otherwise just another milepost on the way to something bigger.

I still didn’t know exactly what to ask him.

The drive hadn’t unlocked Dan Lanning. It hadn’t suddenly made press conferences easier or turned me into someone with his certainty.

But I knew what Richmond looked like now. I knew how small William Jewell felt. I knew what Park Hill South represented and how long I-70 became after midnight.

I knew how to get around a flood.

I knew what 820 miles felt like.

It felt like opportunity.