Written by Paul Myerberg at USAToday.com
Oregon’s loss to rival Oregon State in this year’s Civil War capped a fitting end to the program’s worst season in a generation, which has cast a spotlight on Mark Helfrich’s job security just two years after he led the Ducks to the doorstep of a national championship.
Helfrich met Oregon athletics director Rob Mullens to discuss his future Tuesday night and left the meeting without a job. Internal discussions about the football program began before Saturday’s loss, according to USA TODAY Sports. Since Saturday, Helfrich had been in coaching purgatory, with two feet straddling the line between retention and dismissal.
There is something far bigger than just Helfrich at play at Oregon, which in the past two decades has grown into one of college football’s elite programs. First as the offensive coordinator and then as head coach, Helfrich deserves recognition as a key figure behind the Ducks’ surge.
Firing Helfrich is a repudiation of perhaps the defining characteristic of Oregon’s run: the 40-season stretch of continuity that led from Rich Brooks to Mike Bellotti, from Bellotti to Chip Kelly and from Kelly to Helfrich.
And the school did it by repudiating his performance in its official announcement, closing the news release with a bizarre and completely unnecessary recounting of events that took shots at Oregon relying on graduate transfers in the post-Mariota era, revisiting a blown lead in the 2015 Alamo Bowl loss, specifically pointing out Helfrich’s decisions to go for two points five times at Nebraska this season and using the term “one-sided” to describe three of the Ducks’ losses this season.
Those passages were later removed by the author, who apologized on Twitter for including them.
