David Zalubowski

By Andrew Greif, The Oregonian/OregonLive

Fall Saturdays were different last year for Mark Helfrich.

Not bad. Just, different.

Nine months after he was fired as Oregon's coach in December 2016, Helfrich was in a three-man Fox Sports broadcast booth, part of his first foray into the media side of college football after 20 years coaching it. He sat in with coaches as they prepared. On game day, some of the electricity he felt as a coach returned. He spoke into a headset again.

"Game day was exciting," Helfrich told The Oregonian/OregonLive this week. "But postgame it was weird. The result didn't really matter. If I screwed something up, nobody really cared, probably."

As a coach, he'd spend the hours after games trying to solve issues that cropped up during them. After a broadcast, it was just time to head back to the hotel.

"An empty feeling that way," he said.

This fall, Helfrich will be back in a more familiar routine.

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The 44-year-old Oregon native is in his first NFL season as offensive coordinator with the Chicago Bears after his January hiring on the staff of new coach Matt Nagy. The pair share an agent and also apparently a sensibility. Their first conversation came last fall and was brief. But after only 15 minutes, according to NBC Sports' Peter King, Nagy asked Helfrich whether he had interest in joining a staff should Nagy get a head coaching job, and Helfrich signaled he was in. And so began the next, new chapter of Helfrich's coaching career.

This week, Helfrich jogged off the Bears' practice field during training camp in Bourbonnais, Illinois, and signed autographs. Just days earlier, Chicago opened the preseason against Baltimore in the Hall of Fame Game in Canton, Ohio. It was Helfrich's first game as a coach in 20 months.

"I always joke that the players' parking lot is a lot different but so much of it is the same," he said of his transition from college to the NFL. "It's a lot more football-focused, obviously in the offseason in terms of what you're doing. Both in evaluating your current roster, evaluating potential free agents, evaluating potential draft picks or signees."

Had he made a different decision earlier in his career, he might be an NFL lifer by now.

There were opportunities to coach in the pros as he worked his way up, but when he listened to recommendations he found himself siding with those in favor of college. The choice eventually led him to a head coaching job in 2013 at Oregon, the school he cheered for growing up in Coos Bay and a place of special meaning for his family. There he developed Marcus Mariota into the school's lone Heisman Trophy winner and became financially secure. His 37-16 record was marred by a 4-8 final season in 2016, after which he was owed $11.6 million as part of his buyout. He settled with UO instead for a lump sum of $8.1 million, a decision that allowed him to work in TV last fall.

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He broadcast games in college towns like Austin, Lincoln and Corvallis. But in the breaks between kickoffs, he debated whether he should return to campus for the next phase of his coaching career, or try something new.

In 1995, Oregon coach Rich Brooks considered a similar question before a lucrative contract from the NFL's Rams persuaded him to make the leap. Brooks had spent four years as a pro assistant early in his career, and upon his NFL return he took several UO staffers with him, including Nick Aliotti.

"You don't have to worry about the alumni relations, recruiting, you just don't have a lot of the issues that take a lot of the time as a college coach," Brooks said.

Said Aliotti: "You just are coaching ball."

But the power dynamic between coach and player is also starkly different. In college, players aren't paid beyond their scholarship and need success to launch a pro career. Coaches are gatekeepers, and the most successful can feel like institutions.

In the NFL, power is wielded differently. Star players regularly outlast the staffs that coach them.

"You're dealing sometimes in some organizations with power struggles between the GM, the pro personnel guy, the college personnel guy, the owner, the president of the organization," Brooks said. "Usually the coach is the low man on the totem pole."

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Both Brooks and Aliotti eventually returned to coaching in college, saying they missed the closer relationships that came from catching players at a younger time of their lives.

Neither Aliotti nor Brooks were among those Helfrich turned to for advice during his 2017 "sabbatical" from coaching, a year away he used to get better. But those whose counsel he did seek favored the NFL lifestyle for similar reasons. Former UO assistant and current Tampa Bay coach Dirk Koetter, a close friend of Helfrich, coached in college for 21 years before joining the NFL in 2007 and he hasn't gone back since. His argument boiled down to this: It's pure football.

When Helfrich went on vacation in June with his family, it was a true getaway — no recruiting or discipline calls to make.

"Certainly the timing of this was good just in terms of something new, completely different, fresh start, all that stuff," Helfrich said. "Again, so much of it is the same. Guys coming together as a staff, guys coming together as a team, it's all the same.

"... We're in a great spot. There's a lot of great people here who are hungry to win. The front office people are obviously very supportive and now we have to win. Like anywhere."

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Nagy's staff spent months working closely because they had yet to move their families to the Chicago area. That extended time together has helped the staff "speak the same language," Helfrich said.

It also left little time to track the Oregon program he once stood atop. During a podcast interview last fall, Helfrich said that while the firing was no longer raw it was nonetheless "weird" to live near Eugene while his successor, Willie Taggart, changed nearly everything about UO's program before bolting for Florida State.

Given how far back his history went with UO, does any emotional tug toward UO remain?

"Yes and no," he said. "I don't follow on a daily basis just from being busy. We just finished our 27th day here and moving our kids out and family out and all that stuff, every minute is accounted for. I certainly don't have any ill will or anything. I wish them nothing but the best."

He also "would never discount anything" regarding a potential return to college as a head coach — there were offers to go back to college this winter, he said, without specifying if they included head-coaching opportunities — but the NFL is now his home.

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"He's been in quite a few different systems and I think he can adapt his knowledge of those systems to the pro level and talents of pros," Brooks said. "One of the things that is different than his tenure at UO is clock management and making sure you're doing things to keep your players as fresh as possible. It becomes a lot more predominant in the NFL. Field position, the opportunity to milk the clock when you have a lead — those are the things that I'm sure he'll be in the process of adapting to."

Nagy calls Chicago's plays, meaning Helfrich's role is similar to when he served as Oregon's offensive coordinator under play caller Chip Kelly. Just as Helfrich was charged with coaching QBs in Eugene, a critical part of his job now is developing quarterback Mitch Trubisky,.

But in the NFL, the hash marks are tighter. Rules are different. August no longer brings carefully guarded instrasquad scrimmages at Autzen Stadium but a completely new experience for Helfrich — televised preseason games.

"That part of it," he said of the preseason, "is certainly new to me."

And yet, this part wasn’t. After the Aug. 2 Hall of Fame game, he would have had video to pore over and issues to solve.

Just like before.

— Andrew Greif

agreif@oregonian.com

@andrewgreif

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