AUSTIN, Texas -- He tugged their shorts to slow their strides. He whispered in their ears to break their concentration. He frustrated opponents so much, while he himself stayed so calm, that one stopped him during a basketball game with a plea: stop playing so hard.



Long before Dakota Prukop listened to recruiting pitches from college football's elite, earned All-America distinction at Montana State or became Vandegrift High School's Big Man on Campus, coaches noticed something about him they believe explains an unlikely route that's led him to Oregon as the Ducks' favorite to start at quarterback in the fall.



Beyond his athleticism and beneath a magnetic charisma boils Prukop's need for competition and his search to quiet the doubts he's heard since he was a teen at an upstart high school that, in its first years, had no business beating anybody.



"Coaches hated coaching against him, players hated playing against him," said Cliff Ellis, Vandegrift's basketball coach. "He was relentless, and ruthless."



And at Vandegrift, perched amid dark woods atop one of several rolling hills separating well-heeled west Austin suburbs from its trendy downtown, the stories told about him remain timeless.



So skilled in the "artform" of agitation that he remains the school's career leader in rebounds grabbed, charges taken and, unofficially, technicals baited and would-be tacklers stiff-armed.



"He has a nasty streak in him," said Drew Sanders, Vandegrift's football coach, a knowing smile at the thought. "Don't let it fool you when you talk to him. He has a little bit of linebacker in him."



Forget that Prukop has been gone longer (four years) than his tenure at Vandegrift (three years), which opened when he was a sophomore in 2009. There is no avoiding him still. Visitors walking to the weight room must pass a mural the length of a hallway where a nearly life-size Prukop leaps near the middle, permanently hurdling a tackler.



"He's a legend at Vandegrift," Sanders said.



In Texas, the state where everything is said to be bigger, a tall tale about a zero-star recruit who transformed into a quarterback fought over by college football's most entrenched powers would seem to fit right in. Yet Prukop's stories are not exaggerations. Instead, they collectively are clues to answers for questions buzzed about in Austin and beyond during this college football offseason.



How exactly did Prukop go from overlooked to coveted in just five years? And will Prukop be the catalyst in Oregon's pursuit of a Pac-12 and national championship after a disappointing 9-4 season?



On Wednesday, when recruits can sign letters of intent, the most intriguing Ducks prospect will not be an unproven high schooler but the electric FCS graduate transfer who will try to capture transfer-quarterback lightning twice for Oregon.



It's a story not only of frustrated opponents but of what happened when Prukop got frustrated, too.

* * *

When Drew Sanders became Vandegrift's football coach, the school wasn't yet complete, "didn't even have colors, I didn't know our mascot." In 2008, the first workouts were held at a nearby high school.



Overseeing the first training session, Sanders didn't have much. But he quickly found his program's keystone.



"I said, 'Who plays quarterback?' He goes, 'I play quarterback,'" Sanders said of Prukop. "He was basically an assistant coach since his freshman year to me. He was my ringleader."



With around just 600 students at its opening, Vandegrift took its beatings. Just 28 players turned out for its first varsity schedule, in 2010, and two were kickers. But even as Prukop understood success hinged largely on his staying on the field, he would do so on his terms.



"Eventually," Sanders said, "we had to kind of tell him to quit trying to run over people at quarterback."



The attitude became pervasive. Vandegrift, in turn, became something other than a pushover. In 2010, Rouse High scored in the final minute to move within seconds of its first victory of the season. Players doused the coach in Gatorade, remembered Greg Cooper, Vandegrift's offensive coordinator. Then Prukop's 50-yard completion put the Vipers in position for their game-winning field goal.



Said Cooper: "That's Dakota. He'll fight 'til there's nothing left to give."





Amy Gallagher, who runs a peer assistance program that Prukop volunteered with, still calls him "one of those students that will forever have a place in my heart due to his kindness, dedication, and true leadership skills."



Opponents saw all of those qualities, except for the kindness. His basketball team both short and short-handed, Ellis often asked the 6-foot-2, 180-pound Prukop to defend forwards half a foot taller. Prukop did so using physical gifts and mental tricks that made him beloved by teammates and loathed by opponents who, only too late, realized they'd taken the bait.



"He would agitate the opponents so much that they would actually try to throw a punch and get a technical," Ellis said. "He'd look at me and kind of wink."



The competitiveness and athleticism are traceable in the family tree. Prukop's father, Tim, played at UC Davis and coached for 16 years including stints at Arizona State from 1988-90 and USC from 1993-96. All Tim's brothers played college football, as well, and their father played defensive back and quarterback for USC under iconic coach John McKay.



But more important, multiple Vandegrift coaches and staffers recalled, was how he leveraged his skills and drive to mold others in his hard-charging image. If he wasn't comfortable in the role until he was a senior, the process began during those first workouts.

Montana State quarterback Dakota Prukop (5) runs against Cal Poly in September.



"When we got here, we had nobody," Ellis said. "There were no seniors. There were no juniors. It was just sophomores (like Prukop), so they had nobody to look up to. They had to figure everything out on their own, and so they had no leadership and that's what kind of drove Dakota. Somebody had to step up and be the leader. He was the obvious choice."



Even Cooper, a muscular and middle-aged longtime Texas football and wrestling coach with intense eyes and a shaved head, softens when describing Prukop.



"Born leader," he said.



And so it became that nearly every Vandegrift student or opponent came to know Prukop. But there was a catch.



To college football recruiters, Prukop remained anonymous.

* * *

Five years ago, Prukop was a high school junior splitting time at quarterback. This would have been a problem had any recruiters shown up: Vandegrift was so new its address wasn't always recognized by turn-by-turn navigation. When Prukop traveled to meet college programs on their turf, interest at Texas Tech and SMU wasn't ultimately mutual.



Two years ago, he was locked in a quarterback competition at Montana State. Last November, Montana State's season ended in a 19-point loss that few outside of Big Sky country noticed.



And yet in early December, college football's gold standard, Alabama, rolled out the crimson carpet for Prukop. Had there been more time to take official campus visits, Michigan and hometown Texas would have done the same. In a "surreal" phone call, Prukop turned down Nick Saban in favor of an Oregon staff that shrewdly contacted the QB a week before anyone else.



That transformation from anonymity to nationwide attention goes back to a blank check written in 2011, but also is rooted in something deeper.



A natural at finding opponents' break points, then using his competitiveness to wear them down, Prukop himself can be baited. Challenge his athletic pride, and he will respond.



"The old coaching adage, you want your best player to be your hardest worker?" said Ellis. "Well he was. And that's rare."



At several points during his junior season, Prukop sat with Sanders to ask how he could improve. Armed with those ideas and nine months of offseason until his senior year, Prukop told his father he wanted not only to win Vandegrift's job outright, but play quarterback in college, too.



His father wanted to help. But before handing over the check to find the best training possible near Austin, he delivered the blunt truth, drawing on his experience as a coach.



"I said, 'You're 6-2, you're a great athlete, so you've got an opportunity,'" Tim Prukop said. "'I'll tell you that there are about 1,000 other guys like you who want to do the same thing, though.'"



There would be no quarterback competition the following summer.



Said Cooper: "He came back his senior year and it was just like night and day."



In spring 2014, new Montana State offensive coordinator Tim Cramsey's top priority was filling the void left by departed All-America quarterback DeNarius McGhee. Prukop's athleticism to run the wide-open scheme was unquestioned. But Cramsey, who liked Prukop from the start and wanted to stoke his competitiveness, needled him about his arm.



"My coaching tactic with Dakota during spring ball or summer was, 'I'm not sure you can do that, I'm not sure you can make that throw,'" said Cramsey, who, as a former New Hampshire quarterback, overlapped with Chip Kelly and favored a similar uptempo offense. "You would have thought I kicked his dog. He just said, 'I'm going to catch up and I'm going to pass him.' And he did.



"If you tell a kid that, then he's going to come back and prove you wrong."



Montana State produced the ninth- and third-ranked offenses in FCS during the seasons Cramsey and Prukop overlapped in Bozeman, with Prukop completing at least 62.8 percent of his passes and remaining durable enough to finish with 69 total touchdowns. In a 55-50 loss to Eastern Washington in September, Prukop either threw or ran on 74 of Montana State's 104 plays from scrimmage, gaining 549 total yards.



"That kid is so intense in everything he does," said Portland State coach Bruce Barnum, whose 38th-ranked scoring defense allowed Prukop to gain 211 yards passing and 102 rushing. "You seldom see a kid like that."

* * *

Montana State quarterback Dakota Prukop runs against East Tennessee State in October, two months before he became the hottest college football transfer, eventually choosing Oregon over Alabama.

Prukop, who enrolled in classes at UO in January, must first win the job, but should he emerge as the starter ahead of the Sept. 3 season opener against UC Davis, he'll be surrounded by the kind of talent and support he never had at depth-challenged Vandegrift or Montana State, whose defense last fall allowed an average of 34.3 points.



UO is expected to be ranked among the national top 20, and contend for a Pac-12 North division championship.



Those spoils, Oregon's prominence and the expectations that come with both will put Prukop at the center of a bright spotlight that will introduce him, and his successes or failures, to the biggest audience of his football career. Some of what happens will be out of his control. Oregon's defense is undergoing a change in scheme and leadership, the offensive line must rebuild its entire left side, and the early entry to the NFL draft of star receiver Bralon Addison takes away an explosive playmaker.

But no position invites a microscope quite like quarterback, and the difference in Oregon's potential with and without a serviceable signal-caller was laid bare last season.



"Haven't seen much that says you're even good enough to cut it there," one user wrote to Prukop via Twitter after his commitment to UO. "Prove it."



A challenge issued, a challenge received.



"His athletic ability and his arm and all that type of stuff is one thing," said Cramsey, who joined Nevada's staff in January as offensive coordinator. "But you add it to his work ethic, his intangibles, his competitiveness, and that to me is what leads me to believe he'll make this jump (to the FBS) pretty easy for him."



Like Prukop, his alma mater is bracing for its big change next fall. Due to a growing enrollment, it will now play in Texas' largest classification.



"I wish we had Dakota to go into that," Ellis said.



Preparation for that leap up in competition has already begun in the Vandegrift weight room.



High on a wall near the door hangs a display of personal bests for strength and speed. On it, a placard denotes Prukop as power-clean record-holder for quarterbacks. But beneath it is what could be taken as another reminder of his presence.



Painted in black, block letters the size of dumbbells, is a creed: "Nobody outworks the Vipers."



-- Andrew Greif

agreif@oregonian.com

@andrewgreif