If you don’t think they like football in the great American Northwest like they do in the South and in some other areas, then you haven’t seen the Oregon Ducks play at home. The Ducks’ home field, Autzen Stadium is as nice a facility as you will see and the fans are loud and they passionate. Oregon football coach, Mark Helfrich, took over the head coaching job after the 2012 season after previous coach, Chip Kelly left for the NFL.
Helfrich was promoted from Offensive Coordinator and he inherited a pretty solid Quarterback. You may remember him as Marcus Mariota who would go on to win the Heisman Trophy in 2014.
Helfrich’s first season was an 11-2 campaign in which they tied Stanford for the Pac 12 North championship, but the Cardinal beat the Ducks on the field and would go on to play in the Rose
Bowl.
The 2014 season was a good one for Helfrich and the Ducks. They were upset by the Arizona Wildcats at home, 24-31, but they avenged that loss by crushing the Pac 12 South champion, Arizona, 51-13 in the Pac 12 Championship game.
That win, and their reputation and ranking helped them get a playoff spot in the first ever college football playoffs.
As usual, the Ducks had a great offense, but their defense was not all that good. They did beat Florida State, 59-20, before losing to the Ohio State in the championship game.
To be fair, they lost to the Buckeyes, 20-42, and Ohio State scored the exact same against Alabama. Oregon also lost most of their top receivers.
In 2015, Oregon was without Mariota who was a first round pick by the Tennessee Titans. They had transfer Quarterback Vernon Adams Jr from Eastern Washington and he was adequate when healthy and helped the Ducks to a 9-4 record.
That’s not a great won/loss record for a top program, but it’s not bad, either. The bigger problem than losing Marcus Mariota may have been a defense that finished near the bottom of the rankings in total defense at 117th.
Helfrich made moves to fix the defense, or so he thought, but they actually were worse and almost
finished dead last at 126th. Only Arizona State and Texas Tech finished with a worse defense statistically than Oregon. With such youth on offense, the Ducks finished a rather disappointing 4-8 on the season.
This drug is less expensive and very safe and is at online order viagra the peak of its erection. These factors then lead to incomplete sexual satisfaction and can bet the big triggers on lowering sexual desire.Kamagra is a form of https://unica-web.com/index-german.html cheap cialis that works best by boosting the sexual potential to the great extent. On the basis of the specification, these problems are further subdivided into neurogenic, vasculogenic, cheap tadalafil canada and hormonal etiologies. However, since it is way less effective than prescription chemicals, one must consume larger quantities of it to the people at large has shop viagra online backfired on them…
Helfrich was fired after leading the Ducks to a 37-16 record.
Replacing Mark Helfrich will be the now former University of South Florida coach Willie Taggart.
Was Willie Taggart a wise choice for Oregon?
Time will tell, but it will definitely be a challenge for him.
The first thing he will learn is that as a native of Florida, there are not going to be good recruits in every city and town. There were 10 rated recruits by ESPN in the state of Oregon in the 2016 recruiting class, while Florida will have hundreds. To succeed at Oregon, Taggart is going to have to recruit California and nationwide and try and lure some Southerners to the Great Northwest.
If he can manage to recruit well, he should be successful, obviously.
Taggart is a native Floridian that played college football at Western Kentucky for Jack Harbaugh, the father of coaches Jim and John.
His first head coaching job was also at Western Kentucky, and that did not start out all that well for
him in 2010. His first team posted a miserable 2-10 record. But, then, he proved himself leading the Hilltoppers to two 7-5 seasons in a row.
South Florida needed a coach and they must have seen Taggart as an up and coming coach and they hired him after the 2012 season.
But, like at Western Kentucky, he didn’t exactly impress coming out of the blocks starting off 2-10 again. His Bulls of South Florida steadily improved with a 4-8 record followed by 8-5 in 2015. This past season, Taggart led the Bulls out to a very impressive 10-2 record.
Willie Taggart is only 40 and his career has a long way to go, but he may turn out to be something of a program builder.
If he can figure out how to recruit some top athletes to Oregon, he should do well.
But, he had better not start off 2-10 like he did at Western Kentucky and at South Florida. That won’t fly well with the Ducks.