EUGENE — College football coaching staffs travel across the country each offseason to visit other programs, see how they operate, learn different schemes and exchange ideas as part of annual professional development.
Mario Cristobal used his connections for Oregon’s staff to visit Alabama and Georgia during spring break.
With Cristobal and tight ends/special teams coach Bobby Williams coming to the Ducks from the Crimson Tide and having worked with Kirby Smart in Tuscaloosa, it wasn’t that UO’s staff saw something foreign. It allowed for a direct comparison to two elite programs, who along with Clemson, Oklahoma and Ohio State, have been able to achieve consistency in the College Football Playoff era and are ultimately where Oregon is aiming to reach.
“I think it’s important always to see how teams that are playing for the big trophy, what they look like, how they’re doing things, what the demands are, what the regimen is, the structure, the standards, all things that go with that,” Cristobal said. "We’re junkies. We’re betterment junkies, we’re football and program junkies. I think that I don’t feel comfortable ever telling a player, 'Hey go get better, go lift, go run and get better’ and coaches sit around expecting to have a better season because they’re getting better, coaches have to get better as well.
“I think those are great opportunities where we got to not only watch some things, kind of see where they’re at as well. See how far our program has progressed over the past year or so. But you always pick up some stuff and they pick up some stuff off of you as well.”
As Cristobal goes about rebuilding Oregon showing the entire staff what the inner workings are like in Tuscaloosa and Athens served as the blueprints for a true “program," as opposed merely to winning teams. Winning games is the most important part, but seeing the how and why of top operations provides a means of comparison and ideas for how to better go about things with the Ducks.
“I think the biggest thing that we took from it that we saw was the teaching, the organization and the regimen,” defensive line coach Joe Salave’a said. "Those programs, they’ve been doing it for quite some time. It also have gave us confidence knowing that our guys are working themselves to that opportunity. ... You need to go see it to gauge where you’re at and what it looks like.
“Those are the things that we’re working tirelessly to get our guys to be in that situation, to where they compete with confidence. But knowing they’ve been prepped and groomed for it and not just hype them up with no teeth behind it.”
While Cristobal’s relationships made it possible for Oregon to visit the SEC powerhouses last month, don’t for a second think stopping at the two biggest rivals of Auburn, Oregon’s season-opening opponent was an accident.
“We’ve got a lot of similar things in the way we do our program with our own tweaks," offensive coordinator Marcus Arroyo said. “We’re still working — we’re not Alabama, but it was good to see them work, good to see the detail, good to see the structure. Good to see what kind of things, maybe little tweaks or teaching things, sit in the quarterback room and find a little nugget, ‘that’s a good idea’ or ‘that’s a good way to teach it.’ Those things are priceless for us.”
Though Oregon’s structure, strength and conditioning program, practice techniques and the like may be similar, the most obvious difference the coaches could see was in the depth of talent. That’s the byproduct of ranking in the top 10 and usually the top five nationally in recruiting on an annual basis, which Oregon is also aspiring to after a program-best class in 2019.
“It was definitely mind blowing a little bit as far as the talent level of some of the guys that they had,” wide receivers coach Jovon Bouknight said. “You look at the structure and the way it’s ran, it’s very similar to us. We got the right format, we got the blueprint it’s just some of those pieces look a little different.”