'Win the day' approach brings Oregon within sight of unspoken goal

EUGENE, Ore. — Former quarterback Joey Harrington, a three-year starter who capped his career as a Heisman Trophy finalist, was the first inside Oregon's program to openly discuss the national championship.

It happened in the early days of 2000, just after the Ducks had capped a nine-win season by defeating Minnesota in the Sun Bowl. The year marked another step forward: Oregon had added one win to its total in each of the previous three seasons, slowly — perhaps too slowly — taking the steps necessary to compete for the conference championship.

Harrington, who had just completed his first year as the starter, stood among his peers and gave voice to the mentality behind Oregon's charge into the nation's elite.

Forget this, Harrington said. Forget one win at a time. We've got to compete for the league championship and the national championship. Let's just win the national championship.

"It was the first time I'd ever heard those words ever mentioned," special teams coordinator and tight ends coach Tom Osborne said.

Fifteen years later, that private moment, along with a staff-only meeting in early 2007, have come to define perhaps the most successful program in college football without a national championship to its name. No, the Ducks haven't brought home a title; that doesn't mean the program hasn't long believed a championship stood just around the corner.

Few inside the program understand the scope of Oregon's growth more than five longtime assistants: Osborne, running backs coach Gary Campbell, defensive coordinator Don Pellum, offensive line coach Steve Greatwood and secondary coach John Neal — a quartet with a combined 108 years of coaching experience with the Ducks.

To those coaches that have inhabited a front-row seat to the program's climb, all that Oregon's past shares with its present is a stadium and a parking lot — and even those share little with their predecessors more than location.

"When we started there was nothing here," Pellum said. "Just a stadium and a dirt parking lot. There were more cops in the stadium than fans on game day. It was a different operation, totally. Back then we didn't have much. We were scrambling to get it done with a little."

Said Campbell, "When I first came here (in 1983), having a winning season was the thing that was kind of far-fetched. A national championship? I don't think anyone even fathomed that."

Even after its skyrocketing climb, the program still doesn't speak of national championships — or the Ducks will, but only once, and then not again.

Oregon mentions it on the first meeting of the season, on the first day, Mark Helfrich said, "and then I would wager your paycheck on probably never since then."

"I think you state your goals, you talk about your goals, and then you forget them," Helfrich said. "If we just sit around and talk about winning the lottery, we're going to be spending a lot of money on burnt tickets. But if you go to work and have a possibility of making that happen, you might."

Maybe Oregon doesn't have to speak of national championships; the Ducks have notched double-digit wins in each of the past seven seasons, a streak that began under one coach, Mike Bellotti, hit on a torrid pace under a second, Chip Kelly, and has continued under a third, Helfrich. The program will finish this season with a national ranking for the eighth year in a row, the longest active streak in the Football Bowl Subdivision.

It stands to reason that Oregon doesn't need to discuss the national title — because recent history suggests that Oregon's place in the conversation is assumed.

"It's never talked about," Neal said. "And it's not fearful, it's useless. You have to know that there's this humongous process going on."

But even as the one team in the College Football Playoff without a title — Alabama, Ohio State and Florida State each have multiple championships — Oregon's unwillingness to focus on what's missing stems from two factors: one, the complete faith that a championship lies ahead, and two, the mentality first instilled by Kelly within a week of his arrival in 2007.

He'd been hired as offensive coordinator after a lackluster, six-loss season in 2006. Oregon limped into the offseason: Brigham Young handed the Ducks a 38-6 defeat in the Las Vegas Bowl, forcing the incumbent staff — joined by Kelly — to attempt to define the program's goals.

We want to win the national championship, one assistant said. Kelly offered another option: "Why don't we just win the day," Kelly suggested.

Nearly eight years later, this mantra is emblazoned on every nook and cranny of Oregon's football facilities.

"I know this sounds cliché, but we do everything we can here to just do that one thing — to win the day," Neal said. "We've lived by that for eight years now. That's a long time.

"From that moment on, it took pressure off everybody. Because it wasn't about trying to reach goals, it was about trying to win immediate results of that day and then get better the next day."

The culmination of this effort might be seen in this year's team, which stands within two victories of the national championship.

"We're going to keep grinding until we get it," Pellum said. "We're going to keep pushing. It's just going to be really, really satisfying for me to be part of it and for us to finally get it at Oregon."