How Oregon's Homegrown Coaching Staff Is Bucking the College Football Trend

LOS ANGELES — Mark Helfrich remembers Oregon football from its roots, before Nike's Phil Knight put the Taj Mahal of facilities on campus. And that description might be shortchanging the facilities.     

"There was a lot of space out in the parking lot," he told me Sunday at media day for the College Football Playoff semifinal game against Florida State. "Everywhere that now we have an indoor facility, an athletic complex. Our practice field is the baseball field, the lacrosse…all of that was a parking lot.

"There was some wide-open space out there. We got some good pickup games going."

Helfrich was just a kid then from Coos Bay. Now, he's Oregon's head coach, leading the Ducks into Thursday's College Football Playoff semifinal versus the Seminoles. And that's a nice, feel-good story about a nondescript kid landing his dream job. But also, it's just the Oregon way.

The college coaching profession is filled with vagabonds who hop around the country from one job to the next, preaching loyalty and commitment at every stop. At Oregon, they actually mean it. They have consistently grown in the past few decades from one of the worst programs in the nation to one of the best and richest.

Yet they're doing it with a homegrown coaching staff, the way it used to be done.

Jae C. Hong/Associated Press

Helfrich is the third straight Oregon head coach to be promoted from an assistant's job. And this past offseason, he promoted defensive line coach Don Pellum from linebackers coach to defensive coordinator. The other finalist was another current Oregon assistant.

When Helfrich was a kid in the parking lot, playing pickup games with his friends, Pellum was inside the stadium, playing for the Ducks.

"I think it kind of speaks to another time in football," Pellum said. "At one time, this was normal. Penn State's staff, Bobby Bowden's at Florida State. But I think we're the last of a dying breed. Once we're gone, I don't know if we'll ever see this again.

"It's special and unique just for the bond we all have. But what it did for us along the way, when we were trying to build a program way back when and didn't have a lot of resources and weren't getting a lot of top recruits, we were just getting some good kids and developing them. We've been together so long that we've figured out some things. Then we started to get some better players in here."

And it's all added up to Oregon being just two wins away from its first national championship.

This isn't meant to pass judgment on any other approach. But as playoff money and cable TV money continue to multiply, it is just going to become easier and easier to give up on a direction and buy a bigger-name coach.

When you have money, who needs patience and loyalty?

In fact, if anything, the big money has made the vagabond coaches—which do not include Florida State's Jimbo Fisher, who was promoted from within—into superstars. Contrastingly, Helfrich has remained a relative unknown nationally. That, and the fact that he is just running the system passed down by his predecessor, Chip Kelly.

Don Ryan/Associated Press

The final four in college football features Fisher, Urban Meyer and Nick Saban. They are all stars and the faces of their programs. Yet, according to Michael Weinreb at Grantland, even the kids at Marshfield High, where Helfrich went, can't pick Helfrich himself out of the team picture on the wall in the school. A team takes on the personality of its coach, and that means selflessness in Helfrich's case, which creates a weird dynamic at Oregon.

Here is Phil Knight pumping money into the place to make the program one of the nation's elite, and yet here is a program built on a cozy feeling of family. It's an awkward fit with the national elite.

And while no one is considering firing Helfrich, his first team broke a four-year string of reaching major bowl games. This year, when the team lost to Arizona, even the locals had to wonder if Helfrich was up for the task.

Maybe that will be the real test of Oregon's commitment to the Oregon way, when the team starts to falter. For now, it keeps its family feel.

"That's a good part of it, being able to be at a place where my dad went to school, my mom went to school," Helfrich said. "And my dad played briefly and my uncle played football at Oregon. All of that is certainly a point of pride for everybody."

When Pellum came to Oregon as a freshman, one of the seniors on the team was Steve Greatwood, who is now the offensive line coach.

"Back in the mid-to-late '70s, we had nothing but really friends and relatives in the stands," Greatwood said. "If we have 25,000 people there, it was a big game. The big thing now is the continuity of the staff. And we've all had our kids grow up together."

It's a good bet one of those kids will be the head coach someday. And the others will be his assistants.

Greg Couch covers college football for Bleacher Report.