Scott Frost.JPG

As Oregon's offensive coordinator, Scott Frost will sit one booth away from his brother, Stanford public address announcer Steve, on Thursday at Stanford Stadium.

(Thomas Boyd/The Oregonian)

EUGENE – Though they are brothers, best friends, former teammates and fraternity roommates, Steve and Scott Frost each acknowledge that because of their jobs during No. 2 Oregon’s showdown with No. 6 Stanford, there is a need this week to separate family from football.

Part of that is their doing: their usual telephone calls have ceased for the time being.

The rest will be aided by the layout of Stanford Stadium’s press box.

Thursday evening, a wall and about 15 feet will separate Scott – Oregon’s first-year offensive coordinator – from the booth that holds Steve, Stanford football’s public address announcer since 1999. And it’s that arrangement that will create this scene, over and over, during the most anticipated Pac-12 game of the season: Scott will call a play that, seconds later next door, Steve will attempt to describe.

“Frankly as a public address announcer, announcing an Oregon game is the most difficult thing you’ll have all year in any regular situation,” said Steve, who counts Oregon’s longtime PA man Don Essig as a mentor. “When they came down in 2011 it was brutal. It was going so fast, and they had jerseys with silver numbers on white jerseys. So on top of the speed, my spotters and I just couldn’t read the numbers. By the end of the game I was exhausted.”

For brothers whose lives revolve around football yet whose playing days overlapped briefly – they were teammates two years each in high school in Wood River, Neb., and at Stanford from 1993-94, where they played with a guy named David Shaw – Thursday will be one of the closest transits of their orbits yet.

Those paths apart started in Palo Alto during Christmas break of 1994, when Scott, who is younger by two and a half years, decided to leave Stanford for Nebraska. Steve loved everything about The Farm, however. He stayed in the Delta Tau Delta fraternity house they had each lived in, earned two degrees the next spring and left his dream of being a television sports anchor to work in Silicon Valley’s high-tech sector first at Netscape, then Google.

Some remnants of his anchor dream remained, however. As a senior, he failed to earn Stanford’s football PA job, but became the voice of women’s basketball when coach Tara VanDerveer liked his style. In 1998, he called men’s basketball at Maples Pavilion. One year later, he debuted in the football booth.

Scott took the football path from Nebraska to the NFL for six seasons. Six years after he retired in 2003, he arrived at Oregon.

“There wasn’t much about (Stanford) that I enjoyed and it was the right move for me to get out of there and go to a place that was a little more of a football experience,” Scott said. “But it was the best thing that could have happened to Steve. He’s a very smart guy. A lot smarter than I am.”

There are convincing arguments that each has a mind worth envying.

As quarterback, Scott piloted Nebraska to a national championship with an offense predicated on the option, which gives the QB the responsibility of choosing between several choices on each play. Now he controls a Ducks offense averaging 632.1 yards and 55.6 points per game, both of which are second-best nationally.

“Scott has such a fast mind and great memory that the way he thinks is just a natural fit for the scheme Oregon runs,” said Steve from San Diego, where he is a vice president for business development at Ashford University.

In 2002, a 30-year-old Steve won three games of “Jeopardy,” pocketing $34,100. He lost a fourth on a Final Jeopardy question about South American geography that Scott, sitting in the audience, says he knew. (When Scott later toured the set, he found a poster of himself from his Cornhusker days in the office of the show’s producer, a huge Nebraska fan.)

“I’ve never been a bigger fan of my brother and rooting for him than that,” said Scott, who gave his brother copious coaching tips when Steve began coaching his 8-year-old’s football team. “I kind of got a taste for what it felt like for him to watch me play in national championship games and NFL games.”

Oregon’s victory at Stanford in 2011 -- another high-stakes game with a possible national championship berth on the line – offered a taste of what Thursday will bring. Yet because Scott coached receivers from the sideline during UO’s last trip to Stanford, this season is his first experiencing football from the perspective his brother has mastered for 14 years.

“With Stanford you’ve got time to say everything you want and get a cup of coffee between plays,” Steve said. “(With Oregon) you’re only getting about 10 seconds between plays so what we communicate gets truncated very badly. … It’s fun to watch. I wish I had more time to digest it.”

It will not be a light-hearted occasion, though, even as Steve says his job as the team's voice "is not to be neutral." As sons of family where football “was part of the DNA” they understand the consequences of victories and losses and approach each other’s football responsibilities this week with grave respect.

“I’ll have plenty of time for family reunions other times,” Scott said. “We have a job to do.”