Helfrich in as UO offensive coordinator

Mark Helfrich, 35, has been hired as Oregon’s next offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach.

Helfrich, a Coos Bay, Ore., native, spent the last two seasons at Colorado as the Buffaloes offensive coordinator. Previously he has been on the offensive staffs at Boise State (1998-00), Arizona State (2001-05) and Colorado since 2006. 

The hire of Helfrich, who attended practice Wednesday and was a person of interest by then-head coach Mike Bellotti in the job search for offensive coordinator two seasons ago before hiring Chip Kelly, also coincides with the promotion of Steve Greatwood to running game coordinator. 

Helfrich will be at the Spring Game on Saturday, where he said he will be an “interested observer.”

On the phone Thursday night on a conference call with reporters, Helfrich was happy to be returning to his home state while he admitted was sitting in his office in Boulder, Colo.

“I’m first of all very excited and you know it’s kind of funny I’m sitting in my old office right now staring at the sunset and packing. Kind of an odd feeling.

I have a lot of friends and family in the region that I’m excited about kind of reconnecting with.

“I grew up a Duck fan. It’s just a great opportunity. And the timing of it is certainly different and I think coach Kelly and coach (Dan) Hawkins (Colorado head coach) were great in how they handled the obscurity of the timing.”

As for play calling, “anything is possible,” but no role has been set at this point.

“We’ve talked about that. I’m the company guy,” Helfrich said Thursday night on a conference call with reporters. “If that’s something that Chip wants to do then that’s something, that’s a bridge that we’ll cross like we talked about. If he wants me to coordinate the post-game meal we’ll do a darn good post-game meal. We’ll work through all those issues, situations, etc. as they come.”

Helfrich served as an Oregon graduate assistant in 1997 before beginning his career with the Broncos, where he was quarterbacks coach and helped BSU to fourth in the nation in passing yardage with 321.5 yards per game in 2000. Then he went to ASU, where he helped develop talent like Andrew Walters and Rudy Carpenter. 

He followed former boss Dan Hawkins to Colorado in 2006. A year later, Bellotti inquired his interest into possibly taking over the Oregon offense.

“It was kind of, not that this is great timing, but there are so many variables that go into a situation and at that time we came off a bad year here we had just had our son and to be honest I wasn’t really good leaving this situation,” Helfrich said. 

While Helfrich was in Eugene in the last couple weeks, he said he barely watched tape on Oregon, catching only a few games. When he watched practice Wednesday, he noticed the team’s pace during practice, something he wants to continue during the season through the no-huddle offense Oregon mastered last year. 

“The part that they do so well is a huge difference maker is just the pace of how they’ve done it,” Helfrich siad. “We’ve messed with that at various places and different levels.”

From a press release, Chip Kelly praised Helfrich and Greatwood.

“Mark not only impressed me as a very intelligent individual but as someone who utilized that knowledge to coach quarterbacks at both Boise State and Arizona State,” Kelly said. “I credit much of our success running the football the last two seasons to Steve Greatwood, which is why I feel he has earned the opportunity to expand his role with the Oregon offense.”

Greatwood was publicly disappointed in the offseason when he was not chosen as head coach at Cal Poly, and had said in the past how he wanted the Oregon head job as well. Maybe it’s part of making him feel better about his role at Oregon, or part of purely rewarding him, but he now has a new title and responsibilities that are hard to gather right now. 

Here is more on Helfrich from the press release.

Helfrich’s pupils gained their greatest acclaim during his tenure at Arizona State under former Oregon offensive coordinator Dirk Koetter, who elevated Helfrich to passing game coordinator in 2003. During his five-year stint in Tempe, Arizona State blossomed into one of the top passing teams in the country. In his final season there, the Sun Devils finished third in the NCAA and led the Pac-10 in passing yards per game (373.9 avg.). ASU posted a school-record 4,481 yards passing that season to elevate its five-year total to 18,686 yards (306.3 avg.) during his stay.

 

His quarterbacks put up numbers that ranked in the top three of the Pac-10 all five years he was there, leading the league twice (2004, 2005) and finishing second in 2001. His units also finished among the top 10 in the NCAA on three different occasions, as ASU was ranked fifth nationally in 2004 and ninth in 2002 before the school’s highest ever finish with the third place effort in 2005.

Ranking as the third-youngest offensive coordinator in the nation a year ago (and the youngest at a BCS school), Helfrich’s offense’s were marked by improvement each of his first two seasons at Colorado, with the Buffaloes’ 5-7 record highlighted by a 17-14 overtime win over West Virginia a year ago.

 

His first Colorado offense was plagued by inconsistency yet demonstrated explosiveness. CU averaged 4.5 yards per carry and featured three different players rushing for 500 yards or more for just the 10th time in school history. His 2007 team was just the third in school history to gain 1,000 yards on offense more than the previous season in the same number of games, and scored 30 or more points five times in a season for the first time since 2002.

 

Last season, the Buffaloes finished at the bottom of the Big XIII Conference in total offense (318.5 avg.) and scoring offense (20.2 ppg). Hampering their efforts was the loss of two starting offensive linemen in the first four games of the year as well as a receiving corps that resorted to starting three walk-ons in the season finale in a 40-31 loss at Nebraska.

 

At Arizona State, he played a significant role in the development of quarterback Andrew Walter, who set school records for both career (85) and single-season touchdowns (30) in addition to shattering the previous Pac-10 record for career touchdown passes, previously set by Stanford’s John Elway at (77). One of only two players in ASU history to tally 3,000 passing yards in a season, Walter did it for a third time in 2004 with a best of 3,150 yards.

 

Walter, a third-round NFL draft pick by the Oakland Raiders in 2005, finished his collegiate career as the Sun Devils’ career record holder in nearly every passing category, including yards, completions, attempts, touchdowns, interception percentage, and total offense. When Walter missed the 2004 Sun Bowl against Purdue with an injury, Helfrich tutored sophomore understudy Sam Keller to the game’s MVP honors.