In sports, it’s almost a rite of passage to find yourself on the wrong end of a rant or chewing out by one of your leaders. Along the way to his ascent to becoming the Oregon Ducks head coach, Dan Lanning has experienced his fair share of chewing outs. Recently, during a sit-down interview with Will Compton on the Bussin’ with the Boys Podcast, the Ducks headman took a moment to recall the biggest rant he received from arguably the greatest college football head coach of all time, Nick Saban.
Lanning spent one season as a graduate assistant under Saban’s tutelage in 2015. During that time, he saw and experienced a lot at Alabama. In this particular instance, when he drew the ire of the Crimson Tide headman, Lanning found himself in the crosshairs thanks to Paul Finebaum’s appearance at an Alabama football youth camp.
“So I was in the outfield, [and] I was a GA. But remember, we ran a kids camp, and we must have been working like 7-8-year-old kids, right? He ran kids camp like we’re running Alabama fall training camp,” said Lanning. “And I get there kind of late, and I’m kind of just learning the process; I’m a little bit of a fly on the wall. One of our strength coaches is running bag drills, and he leaves; he leaves the bag drills; he’s got to go work out our guys. So I just started doing bag drills like I did at Park Hill South or like I did at Sam Houston State. And I was not doing bag drills right.”
“Coach Saban came over, and it happened to be a day that Paul Finebaum was falling around, and he laid into me. He let me know what bag drills were supposed to look like. You know, it was a great example of how everything mattered to him. It didn’t matter we were coaching 8-year-olds; it mattered you were doing the drill right. So, I stayed up that night and watched every drill to make sure I had them mastered, just in case I got thrown in the fire.”
At that time, the timing couldn’t have been any worse for Lanning. He was not the original individual overseeing the drill, nor was he fully familiar with Saban’s methods. Couple that with the seemingly relaxed environment of it being a youth football camp for seven and eight-year-olds and the presence of Finebaum, and you have the perfect recipe for a Saban chewing out.
Fortunately for the Oregon head man, he took the rant and stride and used it to become better and be more aware of what is expected procedure at Alabama. Not only that, but it appears as if he took Saban’s insatiable thirst for flawless execution and utilized it to help him become the current head coach at Oregon and also a national championship-winning defensive coordinator under Georgia head coach Kirby Smart, another promising individual from the Saban coaching tree.
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