Inside Dane Stevens's climb from USC student assistant to one of college football's bright young offensive coordinators

The task was breakfast for the USC Trojans coaching staff, and Dane Stevens, former walk-on-lineman-turned-medically-retired-student-assistant-coach, was in charge.

No task too small.

Nonetheless, only two arms available for the job at hand and enough Styrofoam containers for a shipping crate.

How, exactly, is Dane Stevens, at just 27, NCAA Division I college football’s second-youngest offensive coordinator behind 25-year-old Mississippi Valley State play-caller Eli Johnson with Stevens’s hiring this week at the University of West Georgia?

A wisdom beyond his years to give up playing when injuries made it impossible and a breathless approach to completing any task set before him.

Which included breakfast runs for virtually all of Lane Kiffin’s then-USC staff, making copies for staff meeting, cutting up the film “that even the G.A.s didn’t want to do” and, in general, finding how to become both invisible and indispensable.

“My role was to do whatever, making coffee, copies, airport runs; honestly, just the grunt-work of having to make sure no job was too small,” said Stevens, hired earlier this week at West Georgia’s burgeoning program making its climb into FCS football. “I can remember going down to the cafeteria and having to make literally like eight coaches’ breakfasts, just arms full of these Styrofoam containers. Film breakdown, whatever work was leftover. This was prior to PFF, so we had all that data and I’m just old enough I had to type in all the hard data, down and distance, type it all in manually.

“I was working coaching hours and also going to school. I say this respectfully, it wasn’t like I was going to some average academic place. USC is a top-20 academic school in the country, taking real classes, and I graduated in three years.”

A Powder Springs, Georgia, native, Stevens sees in Taylor and the Wolves’ program a setting that embraces energy in an upward trajectory.

It doesn’t hurt that Stevens and Taylor are just months removed from a chance first encounter. As part of Kiffin’s Ole Miss staff, in an offensive analyst role working with quarterbacks, Stevens helped guide Rebels quarterback Jaxson Dart through a breakout 2023 campaign that opened in the team’s win against Mercer, where Taylor had turned around one of the nation’s worst defenses into a top-25 unit before he accepted the UWG job last month.

“Coach Taylor is a great guy; we had a mutual friend,” Stevens said. “We played Mercer in our first game, had a lot of success on offense. Once the season kind of got done with, we connected through that mutual friend. I came on an interview, did well there and I’m just really excited.

“I think this is a really unique opportunity, West Georgia is a program on the rise, bringing some attention to the program is great and being close to home for me is also important.”

Stevens, assembling his initial staff to include fellow Ole Miss 2023 staffer David Whitlow Jr. as UWG’s new wideouts coach, recruiting on the 2024 class and carving his plan for spring, is eager to implement his “All Gas, No Brakes” approach.

“You’re only as good as the people you have been around, and I’ve been very lucky to be around some really good people,” said Stevens, who played his high school ball at Mount Paran Christian School in Kennesaw, Georgia. “My dad wasn’t a big-time coach or my uncle wasn’t, so I really just had to kind of within the framework of opportunities presented to you make the most of it. Create an in for yourself, almost. My mentality always was like as student, G.A., analysts, hell even now, it’s just I always want to make sure I create value with a positive impact on the program I’m representing. Everyone is replaceable, but you can still make yourself really hard to replace.”

Though he’s not the first to seek to implement the frenetic, defense-taxing approach, Stevens is unique in his foundational mentors for his philosophy.

Tutors include Kiffin, Ole Miss offensive coordinator Charlie Weis Jr. and John David Baker, the former USC and Ole Miss assistant who’s now calling the offense at East Carolina.

“From a scheme standpoint, obviously you look at being around Coach Kiffin and Coach Weis running a really fast-pace, uptempo offense, with the combination of pro-style concepts and not just running traditional spread stuff,” Stevens said. “And then obviously with John David Baker and Graham Harrell at USC together, just kind of the big thing I’ll say for JDB is that he’s really good at deciding, ‘Whatever we decide we’re gonna do, we’re gonna pick from schematics, concepts and then pick what we want to do. But don’t pick too much, and be great at what you do.’

“We’re going to approach it that we’re going to be better at what we do than you are at what you do.”

Stevens, who earned undergraduate and graduate degrees from USC, credits a masterclass in authenticity from his coaching mentors as priceless education.

“Getting to be around guys who are unapologetically themselves, from coaching to handling players to being who they are, they’re going to do that and so being around that was great,” Stevens said.

“With Coach Kiffin, obviously he’s an offensive genius. He just has this ability to think of things that you wouldn’t think of but, it’s also how detailed he is. Impressive to be around and the same with Charlie, his organizational skills and how detailed and on top of everything, that’s to me what makes Charlie so different. So strategic and methodical.

“How Coach Kiffin handles players and situations and manages people, he has own unique way of doing it, but his ability to get a lot of different people who don’t really know each other to buy into one common goal, I think is maybe the thing that gets most overlooked. We had guys from all over, and we really did have a great culture at Ole Miss. It was special to be a part of.”

Pivoting to his future, Stevens likewise believes a bright horizon awaits West Georgia as it transitions this year into an Football Championship Subdivision program competing in the United Athletic Conference.

“I think it’s a really exciting time for us,” Stevens said. “Coach Taylor is a phenomenal human being and also a great football coach. I believe the vision he has for this program is a really unique one, and we’re going to bring a brand of football, not just on one side of the ball, the overall team and philosophy.

“It’s a unique opportunity here, not just for me but for anyone. We’re going to bring a really exciting brand of football. I can promise you, really fast, all gas, no brakes. That is what we will be about. And we’re never going to back down from anybody. We want players to play fast and have fun but also have a tremendous amount of confidence that when you walk on that field, we want them to feel like no one can beat them.”