Dan Lanning explains why he called Urban Meyer prior to coaching at Penn State

College football coaches will take any edge they can get, particularly in big games. So when Dan Lanning thought of a way to get a leg up ahead of a trip to Penn State, he didn’t hesitate.

The Oregon head coach dialed up the number of a guy who has won more than a few games at Penn State: former coach Urban Meyer. Now a FOX Sports analyst and one of the co-hosts of The Triple Option podcast, Meyer was quick to lend some advice.

“Really I just, I’d never been at Penn State,” Dan Lanning explained on the podcast. “I hadn’t played there. Seen it from afar and knew he’d been in some games there. I just wanted to get his opinion of the place.

“I always try to get an idea of what’s it like and I knew he’d been at places that I’d been at, but I’d never been there so I wanted to get an idea what’s the crowd noise like, when’s it loudest? He gave this concept of hotspots. He’s like, look, first play of the game, first kickoff, punt, third downs. Like it’s going to be really loud. Their student section, like certain areas of the field, you’re going to hear them.”

Penn State, of course, was hosting its White Out game for Oregon’s visit. So Happy Valley was extra amped.

That little bit of knowledge that Meyer provided was just what the doctor ordered for Dan Lanning and company. They took it and ran with it, putting in some practice tweaks that allowed the team to best prepare for the concentrated noise.

“We actually started a little bit of it last week for our guys during the Oregon State game, because it’s going to be something that shows up throughout the year,” Lanning explained. “And kind of built this mindset of, ‘We’ve got to be ready for the hotspots when they show up.'”

And they showed up. Right on schedule, as Meyer had warned.

“It was. It was almost exactly as he described,” Dan Lanning said. “So for us in practice we tried to create that. We have our speakers on the sideline, we have our speakers in the stadium, we have our speakers in the indoor. Every one of them’s on and it’s loud.

“But we didn’t do it for every single moment in practice, we did it for periods in practice. Then we had these Turtleboxes, and I probably had 15 Turtleboxes right behind the offensive line, so when we get in the huddle we had every Turtlebox right on top of the offensive line and we did it these hotspot periods in practice.”

Oregon raced out to an early 17-3 lead in the contest. Penn State would eventually find its footing and claw its way back, forcing overtime. And the potential for a cacophony of sound in extra time.

Dan Lanning had his guys ready. And they delivered.

“Our guys did an unbelievable job,” he said. “We ended up having two false starts in the game, and they were really close in my opinion to not being false starts. But it wasn’t our offensive line. Our offensive line didn’t jump once in the game, which is really impressive in that environment to be able to handle that. Our punt team was able to flip protections, do different things.

“So it was pretty impressive, I thought, for our guys to handle that. And it was some good insight from coach to help us out getting there.”