Penn State football special teams coordinator Joe Lorig hired by Oregon

Penn State head football coach James Franklin will have to replace a second coordinator this offseason.

Special teams coordinator Joe Lorig was hired by the University of Oregon and head coach Dan Lanning, where he’ll be the special teams coordinator and nickels coach. Oregon made the hire official Monday night.

Lorig was hired by Penn State in 2019 and spent three years leading the program’s special teams and coaching the team’s outside linebackers.

He’s the second coordinator to leave after defensive coordinator Brent Pry departed to become the head coach at Virginia Tech.

Franklin didn’t deny the Ducks’ interest in Lorig, which was initially reported the Thursday prior to the team’s Outback Bowl loss to Arkansas.

“There’s a lot of things that factor into this, as you guys could imagine, some professional and some personal,” Franklin said following the Outback Bowl. “But we’ll see how that goes. I think you guys know I’ve been pretty adamant in the past about the type of moves, lateral moves, but there’s also some factors when it comes to where guys are from. Both Joe and his wife are from there, so that factors into this thing as well.”

Lorig, from the Pacific Northwest, earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Western Oregon University and was the football program’s secondary coach in 1997 and 1998, the first job of his career.