Dan Lanning Claps Back At Kirby Smart For Dig About Oregon’s NIL Spending

Georgia Bulldogs head coach Kirby Smart wasn’t shy about calling out his former assistant Dan Lanning at SEC Media Days.

Smart joked that he would like to have “unlimited NIL” money like Lanning reportedly has at Oregon with the backing of Nike founder Phil Knight — a dig to which Lanning fired back at during his appearance on “The Pat McAfee Show” on Thursday.

“I think it’s impressive that guys like Kirby have been signing the No. 1 class in the nation without any NIL money this entire time,” Lanning said . “It’s so impressive. Obviously, coach Smart took a little shot at us — if you want to be a top10 team in college football, you’ve got to have great support, and we have that.

“But it’s one plus one plus one — it’s the 300 teams we went to this spring and visited, it’s the 23 satellite camps, when they come to your campus, it’s our staff, it’s our alignment with our entire university.”

Lanning’s rebuttal, of course, was all in good fun as he and Smart have a good off-the-field relationship. He used to coach under Smart at Georgia from 2018 to 2021, first as outside linebackers coach then as defensive coordinator before taking the head coaching job at Oregon in 2022.

But Smart isn’t the only one to take a shot at Oregon for using NIL funds to its advantage. Many took issue with the Ducks landing three of the biggest names in the transfer portal earlier this offseason in quarterbacks Dillon Gabriel and Dante Moore plus receiver Evan Stewart, with NIL money presumably playing a factor.

But Lanning believes he’s just doing what anyone else in his position would be doing.

“Do we have a lot more [NIL help] than everybody else? I think that'd be an exaggeration or we'd never lose,” Lanning told ESPN . “Everyone else right now is focused on our ice cream cone, and if I'm busy looking at theirs, that means mine's melting.”

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