Former HC Mark Helfrich doesn’t get much love from a great portion of the Oregon fan base. He was the last of the decades-long tradition of continuity at Oregon, and in 2014 he was the man in charge when Oregon reached its peak (though we all hope to see Dan Lanning surpass that mark soon). In 2014 the Ducks won ...

https://fishduck.com/2025/07/how-should-duck-fans-remember-mark-helfrich/

Mark H was a really good man with a very good offensive mind. He was a victim of circumstances, somewhat beyond his control. I thought his removal was premature, especially with some of the young talent he had amassed..........but it was a matter of "what have you done lately". I was sorry to see him go but the program did improve.....as it might have had Mark stayed as coach.

3 minutes ago, FG Lumber said:

I was sorry to see him go but the program did improve.....as it might have had Mark stayed as coach.

I think it would have improved in 2017. I'm sure Hoke would have been fired and Mullens (and Knight) would have had say in the new DC if they opted to keep Helfrich.

The reality was that the old guard of the Oregon staff was fast approaching the end of their ability to keep up with all the changes in college football.

I had another article almost done on the Taggart year and I have one I started on Cristobal. Those have been interesting to reflect on as well.

Nice Man. An example of The Peter Principle. I wish Coach Mark nothing but the best. One of two Oregon coaches who coached in a national championship game and won a Rose Bowl for OBD.

Although the Rose Bowl win was 'this close.' Right, Jameis. 😃

My lasting image of Helfrich is that the chair he sat in for their post game interviews was too big for him. He wasn't hired because Oregon thought he was a great head coach; he was just as close to Chip as there was going to be. It was unfair but Helfrich took the job, and it worked for a while, but the gas ran out and was running on fumes. He might have been able to get it going but I think it was the right decision to move on.

Helf was a true Oregonian and a fellow coastal boy at that! He coached our only Heisman Trophy winner and led us to the NC game with a massive win over FSU. That may have been our most talented team ever.

That said, he whiffed on two DCs and not many coaches survive that. That was not entirely his fault IMHO, I feel like Mullen was being too much of a bean counter instead of just bucking up for the best. Seems he learned that lesson with the hires of Leavitt and Lupoi.

Our recruiting was deteriorating as well. Great man, great football mind, but just not a great HC. If he were coaching the rodents he'd still be there. We just have a higher standard.

Nostalgia can be an addictive drug. What I periodically think about is where Oregon would stand in recruiting today if Taggart hadn't shown the Ducks could recruit nationwide, and Cristobal showed it wasn't just a Taggart thing.

I remember him as someone whose learning curve didn’t match up well with the expectation curve of AD staff and fans alike.

2 hours ago, noDucknewby said:

That said, he whiffed on two DCs and not many coaches survive that. That was not entirely his fault IMHO, I feel like Mullen was being too much of a bean counter instead of just bucking up for the best. Seems he learned that lesson with the hires of Leavitt and Lupoi.

I don't knock the Pellum hire, it was the Oregon way to hire from within when possible and Pellum was close with Aliotti for the better part of 20 years. That seemed like a safe and surefire hire. It didn't work out that way in the end. Pellum didn't have the aggressiveness that Aliotti had when it came to scheme and play-calling.

Hoke was a super-duper-major fail and he was the highest paid Oregon staff member that wasn't the HC at the time of his hire. The Ducks paid out for that disaster. There are so many things that went wrong with that hire. I think first and foremost was that Hoke wanted to shift Oregon's defensive front from the 3-4 to a 4-3. The biggest problem in this shift was that Oregon outright lacked the proper bodies to pull it off. It needed more defensive linemen and a part part of Oregon going for a 3-4 defensive front as to reduce their dependency on those linemen who are difficult to recruit as there aren't very many of them.

From there on out it all just fell apart.

I like to think if Helfrich was given another season Hoke would have been fired and he would have had another shot at hiring.

Perhaps the biggest weakness in Brooks-Helfrich era was that Oregon was so dependent on hiring from within at times that many of those coaches never got terribly good at hiring from a large pool of candidates. Look at what happened to Kelly after he left, he may have finally put together a good staff by his last year at UCLA.

Lanning has done an incredible job in his hires and Cristobal did a good job hiring good people on paper but that never really came together in practice. I look forward to writing on those two coaches and their methods more in the weeks to come.

3 hours ago, FG Lumber said:

Mark H was a really good man with a very good offensive mind. He was a victim of circumstances, somewhat beyond his control

Exactly, the game of social media passed him by. Not necessarily his fault . . . See Saban's voluntary exit as the game passed him by.

3 hours ago, FG Lumber said:

sorry to see him go but the program did improve.....as it might have had Mark stayed as coach.

Yes, but not to the heights we are seeing today due to his, Taggarts and Cristobal's departures.

2 hours ago, noDucknewby said:

Our recruiting was deteriorating as well. Great man, great football mind, but just not a great HC. If he were coaching the rodents he'd still be there. We just have a higher standard.

He was actually in the Oregon norm for the most part.

https://fishduck.com/2022/02/a-defense-of-helfrichs-recruiting-legacy/

He was still under the shadow of the Kelly sanctions which reduced scholarships by a couple per year, not great but not a killer, but what really hurt was the amount of official visits per year dropped from 35 (max) to I believe 28 (I think it's in my article posted above). That was killer to Oregon recruiting at the time because the key was always get likely commits on campus and lock them in with the facilities. That is more or less still the case under Lanning.

But with 23-25 scholarships spots and only about 28 official visitors allowed, they had to get really really selective as to who they would give an official to because they couldn't afford to take as many long shot recruits.

Great example of a long-shot (that paid off) was Kayvon Thibodeux under Cristobal. He didn't see the Ducks as that much of a contender but decided to take an official visit and just take a look at the program. His time at Oregon completely blew him away and that was what sealed the deal for him. However, for every KT out there there far at least 3-5 misses. Even the master recruiter Lanning has suffered a TON of high profiles misses this recruiting cycle.

Oregon was already a conservative recruiting operation and it got worse with those sanctions. The first recruiting class Helfrich would have had without sanctions was 2017 and the uncertainty of his position hurt that class. Taggart took over and brought in a class of a lot of Helfrich recruits who would go on to be stars... more on this soon as I finish the Taggart article.

I do believe context gives us a fuller picture of these individuals. They're human and by default complex. And not to make myself out to be too much of a Helfrich homer but I do believe Helfrich had a culture problem within the program developing and it manifested in 2016. If he was save his job he was going to need to revamp the Oregon culture, which obviously didn't happen.

13 minutes ago, David Marsh said:

I do believe Helfrich had a culture problem within the program developing and it manifested in 2016. If he was save his job he was going to need to revamp the Oregon culture, which obviously didn't happen.

This is why I think he had to go, from stories about that time the team had turned on MH. Kelly created a culture, and whatever shortcomings he had as a coach, "The Blur" and 46-7, covered them up

When your players' best years were their freshman years you have a coaching problem.

As Taggart showed, the gentle nature of Helfrich led to a discipline problem that left players underdeveloped in every possible way, so much so that many regressed in college which means high school teams were better coached.

Helfrich did not have that ability to tailor the mindset of the coaches and players to a growth mindset. It's like he thought a "next play" mindset was good enough, but it isn't.

Helfrich had no business being a head coach. He didn't deserve to have the AD stomp on him publicly as he went out the door, but moving on was the right decision.

Edited yesterday at 07:59 PM1 day by Solar

Great offensive coach and not so great recruiter. Still a good Oregon guy!

1 hour ago, David Marsh said:

He was actually in the Oregon norm for the most part.

https://fishduck.com/2022/02/a-defense-of-helfrichs-recruiting-legacy/

He was still under the shadow of the Kelly sanctions which reduced scholarships by a couple per year, not great but not a killer, but what really hurt was the amount of official visits per year dropped from 35 (max) to I believe 28 (I think it's in my article posted above). That was killer to Oregon recruiting at the time because the key was always get likely commits on campus and lock them in with the facilities. That is more or less still the case under Lanning.

But with 23-25 scholarships spots and only about 28 official visitors allowed, they had to get really really selective as to who they would give an official to because they couldn't afford to take as many long shot recruits.

Great example of a long-shot (that paid off) was Kayvon Thibodeux under Cristobal. He didn't see the Ducks as that much of a contender but decided to take an official visit and just take a look at the program. His time at Oregon completely blew him away and that was what sealed the deal for him. However, for every KT out there there far at least 3-5 misses. Even the master recruiter Lanning has suffered a TON of high profiles misses this recruiting cycle.

Oregon was already a conservative recruiting operation and it got worse with those sanctions. The first recruiting class Helfrich would have had without sanctions was 2017 and the uncertainty of his position hurt that class. Taggart took over and brought in a class of a lot of Helfrich recruits who would go on to be stars... more on this soon as I finish the Taggart article.

I do believe context gives us a fuller picture of these individuals. They're human and by default complex. And not to make myself out to be too much of a Helfrich homer but I do believe Helfrich had a culture problem within the program developing and it manifested in 2016. If he was save his job he was going to need to revamp the Oregon culture, which obviously didn't happen.

Well by your own sourced article, Chip averaged #17.5 Rivals ranking and Helf #22.5, so whether this qualifies as "deterioriorating" or not, it clearly went down. Granted his numbers are very comparable to the Bellotti years, but the bar had been raised and I stand by my assertion. Peace out.

Edited yesterday at 08:19 PM1 day by noDucknewby

1 minute ago, noDucknewby said:

Well by your own sourced article, Chip averaged #17.5 Rivals ranking and Helf 22.5, so whether this qualifies as "deterioriorating" or not, it clearly went down.

It did but it was also higher than Bellotti's so when I say norm... He is basically the average of Kelly and Bellotti.

Regardless the recruiting game needed to improve. Kelly's average was helped by really one incredible recruiting class and being the hottest offense out there.

I would argue that Kelly wasn't going to improve recruiting if he stayed and he probably would start to look more and more like Helfrich's numbers if he stuck around.

The engine of Oregon recruiting was quickly becoming outdated ... A change needed to happen.

Good discussion. I agree with much of what has been said.

Helfrich was an excellent offensive coordinator and a good man. If I remember correctly, it was he who recruited Marcus Mariota. I hated to see him dismissed. However, that was probably the correct decision, not because the fans were restless, but because he had "lost the locker room." I recall a statement from Pharoah Brown,( who had been punished slightly for throwing a snowball at a car), that bordered on contempt for his coach.

What they ought to have done after Chip left was to appoint Nick Alioti as head coach and keep Helfrich as OC. Alioti had the leadership ability to maintain the program. The defensive collapse that doomed Helfrich would not have happened on Nick's watch. Nick would have coached about five years, which would have provided Mark time to develop or to move on. I have always had the sense that, although Nick is too good a Duck to admit it publicly, he was deeply unhappy at being passed over in favor of a man who was much less experienced than he.

10 minutes ago, Triphibius said:

What they ought to have done after Chip left was to appoint Nick Alioti as head coach and keep Helfrich as OC. Alioti had the leadership ability to maintain the program.

I agree that Nick would have been the best choice.

Though I think the end of the legacy staff was fast approaching regardless of who was HC.

The FSU beat down in the Rosebowl was definitely the highlight of the Helfrich era.

But we had lost 10 or 11 starters by the time we played tOSU.

To me, promoting Pellum was OK. He had earned the chance. But hiring Hoke was beyond questionable. That was a bonehead move and many here at OBD recognized it.

Losing the locker room was the last straw.

I will always like MH, good guy, good Oregonian. Not necessarily a HC.

As a result, his firing led to Willie, which led to Mari0, which got us to coach Lanning.

Which was worth the aggravation to get him.

Alls well that ends well.

Someone with close ties to the Helfrich coached teams told me the players had zero respect for Helfrich and that he was totally out of touch with them.

There was a lot of infighting on the team and there were a couple of situations involving racial matters.

The net was Helfrich lost the locker room very early on and was never able to get it back.

I personally don't have strong feeling either way about him but he was never a long term fit at Oregon.

He was good at finding QB’s. He found Mariota and he went after Adams as a grad transfer. Both great Oregon QB’s. I’ll also give him credit for Herbert even though it took Ryan Kelly’s de-commitment for Helf to offer him a scholarship. Otherwise, Herbert would’ve probably been a Bobcat.

BTW, Ryan Kelly never recorded a college stat.

Well, in my very biased view....

Good Points: Great QB coach, and fantastic OC. He had tremendous balance between running/passing, and always had plays for big moments that had not been used in years.

Tough Points: Poor recruiter of players, and even worse at recruiting/hiring assistant coaches. Danno has shown how important excellence in hiring and recruiting is.

His biggest weakness? He was not a leader; he was a brainy OC and without going into a terrible inside story...let's just say that he lost the team in 2015, thus 2016 and beyond was doomed because of it. Why did he do well in 2013 and 2014? Because Marcus Mariota was there, and nobody wanted to let him down. Once he left at the end of 2014...the team was not listening to Helf.

It got me to thinking....Lincoln Riley is their Helf at USC... (Not a leader)

I've always been one to argue recruiting decline sort of gets a bit exaggerated under MH. It's there but I don't put "straightforward decline in recruiting" as a top reason for MH's decline.

He got a lot of kids that a lot of top programs were offering. He also had fair numbers with kids rated outside the top 400 (the more "developmental" portion of the classes) turn out ok.

What I think was poor under MH was an unusually high percentage of "busts" at the very important top of his classes (Canton Kaumatule, Taj Griffin, Kirk Merrit, Malik Lovette, Jalen Brown, Tyrell Robinson, Travis Jonsen, Thomas Tyner -- for those who want to go there); and, probably an unusually high amount of "bad apples" brought in (Kirk Merrit, Tristen Wallace, Austin Maloata, Fotu Leiato, Torrodney Prevot, Darren Carrington).

It could also be argued his last class (2016) was unusually poor, probably poor enough to be marked as concerning. 19 kids and 2 JCs. It only had 3 high school "four stars", Dillon Mitchell of course was very good, the highest rated commit Bryon Young didn't really impact until his senior year, and Tristen Wallace, a guy who managed to get expelled twice before completing his first year at Oregon. Other than Herbert, Dye, and possibly Breeze, not a bunch else.

What I remember hearing over the MH era, was he got stuck with sort of a tough hand in recruiting with a pretty old and established staff, who no longer were willing to do much traveling and/or recruiting (traveling being more important for recruiting back then). Greatwood always got his guys; but, beyond that I had heard that Erik Chinander and at times Helf himself were forced to do much of the legwork.

To the point of letting Helf go, just one year of 4-8 while giving up 41.4 points per game (126 out of 128) arguably was enough. The defensive highlight of the season was probably holding Utah to 28 points. Allowed 70 to UW, 52 to Cal, 52 to Stanford, 51 to WSU, 45 to USC, 41 to Colorado. That is after finishing 116 out of 128 the year prior.

That is not so much a disturbing trend, as it is fall off a cliff. The first MH and Aliotti year (2013) was fine: 20.5 ppg allowed (I recall it was agreed after Chip left NA only wanted to hang around one more year, but wasn't he only like 60 when he left?).

My last recollection is one that usually provides some bit of controversy, the name Todd Orlando.

42 year old Todd Orlando had just completed his first season at Utah State finishing #7 in the country giving up 17.1 ppg (replacing Dave Aranda who had moved to Wisconsin). That was after two solid seasons as DC at not exactly football powerhouse Florida International (actually under then HC Mario Cristobal). Orlando was considered a hot name very interested in the Oregon job.

Rumors were a belief Orlando would have been a poor fit with Oregon's veteran defensive staff (among others). Now Orlando is controversial because he is most known for eventually flaming out at DC at Texas then USC.

However, back then he was a rising name. His defense was strong the next year at Utah State, he moved to Houston where he had a couple good years, then had a good first year at Texas in 2017, before thing started slipping (57th in ppg in 2018 and 65th in 2019 before being fired).

He was also known then to run a defense similar to what NA was running in 2013, so the switch wouldn't have been dramatic. Evidence maybe it wouldn't have been a huge "grand slam" hire; but, arguably much better than the 23.6 ppg, 37.5 ppg, and 41.4 ppg slide under DP and Hoke (not even mentioning the 296 yards and 5 TDs rushing and 538 total yards and 42 points given up in the 2015 NC game). Might have even saved MH's job.

The dagger to the heart of the Helfrich era was 70-21. It was inexcusable. He could've taken Oregon to a bowl game that year and still would've gotten fired. However, his lack of leadership was evident during his first season. Under Chip, Oregon had never been blown out. Helf managed to lose at least one game in blowout fashion every year he was at Oregon. 2013 (Arizona), 2014 (Ohio State), 2015 (Utah), 2016 (take your pick).

It was the uniforms! (Isn't that always the case with OBD?) Mark Helfrich was done in by a series of uniform debacles. Consider:

• The disgusting "Oregon Trail" threads that became a point of humor for the Pirate (WSU coach Mike Leach) after beating us in Double OT at Autzen

• The clownish "Daffy Duck" orange socks uniforms that set the stage to be roasted by Colorado at home

• The retro "Cal Leather Helmet" combination that made us look like absolute buffoons against the Bastard Huskies in our 70 to 21 loss at home

I'm convinced it was the fashion faux pas combined with fittingly ugly home losses that sparked the ire of Duck fans and decision makers. Ultimately, Mark was done in by equipment fails.

2 hours ago, DrJacksPlaidPants said:

The dagger to the heart of the Helfrich era was 70-21. It was inexcusable.

Combine that with the Alamo Bowl and that's the end of things.

Defense has been the Duck's weakness for a long time. And that's what makes the Lanning era exciting right now.