Inside The Panthers

Former Pitt Assistant Turns Down Alabama Job

Former Pitt Panthers assistant Dan Lanning took himself out of the running for the Alabama job.

Stephen Thompson

Former Pitt Assistant Turns Down Alabama Job
Former Pitt Assistant Turns Down Alabama Job /
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PITTSBURGH -- Nick Saban shocked the sports world when he announced that he would step down from his post as the head football coach at Alabama and for a moment, it seemed like a former Pitt Panthers assistant coach would be at the center of the ensuing search for a replacement. 

But Oregon head coach Dan Lanning, who served as a graduate assistant under Todd Graham at Pitt during the 2011 season and was at one point the betting favorite to get the vacant Alabama job according to BetOnline.ag, released a one-minute video on his personal Twitter account saying that he would stay with the Ducks less than 24 hours after Saban's announcement. 

Lanning was an assistant coach at Park Hill South High School, coordinating special teams and coaching wide receivers and defensive backs, when he decided to drive 13 hours to Pittsburgh, where he gave an impassioned pitch to Graham to give him a job. Graham obliged in and even brought Lanning with him to Arizona State when he left Pitt in an infamously shocking fashion after just one season in 2012.

He worked his way up from graduate assistant at Arizona State to a recruiting coordinator for the Sun Devils, then a defensive backs coach and co-recruiting coordinator at Sam Houston State. 

In 2015 he took a graduate assistant position at Alabama, where his connection to the Crimson Tide is rooted, before moving on to take higher positions at Memphis, Georgia and then Oregon. He's led the Ducks to a 22-5 record, two bowl wins and back-to-back finishes in the top-15 of the final AP poll of his two seasons as head coach in Eugene. 

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Stephen Thompson
STEPHEN THOMPSON

Stephen Thompson graduated with a bachelor's degree in communications and political science from Pitt in April 2022 after spending four years as a sports writer and editor at The Pitt News, the University of Pittsburgh's independent, student-run newspaper.  He primarily worked the Pitt men's basketball beat, and filled in on coverage of football, volleyball, softball, gymnastics and lacrosse, in addition to other sports as needed. His work at The Pitt News has won awards from the Pennsylvania News Media Association and Associated College Press.  During the spring and summer of 2021, Stephen interned for Pittsburgh Sports Now, covering baseball in western Pennsylvania. Hailing from Washington D.C., family ties have cultivated a love of Boston's professional teams and Pitt athletics, and a fascination with sports in general.  You can reach Stephen by email at stephenethompson00@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter. Read his latest work:

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