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Oregon Ducks offensive coordinator Mark Helfrich is considered a strong candidate to replace Chip Kelly as the football team's head coach.

(Photo by Thomas Boyd/The Oregonian)

EUGENE -- Mark Helfrich and Matt Sayre don't talk as often these days. When they do, they don't talk football.

"It's a gentlemen's agreement," Sayre said. "He and I are a lot more than football."

Football was their initial bond when they met at Southern Oregon University in 1995. Sayre, a couple of years removed from his days as a small-college quarterback, was a young coach who had just arrived at the NAIA school in Ashland. Helfrich, a skinny quarterback from a small town, was entering the final season of his record-setting career at SOU.

Sayre soon discovered in Helfrich a genuine, caring and hardworking young man who was "just different" from most college kids. Helfrich, the student body president at Coos Bay's Marshfield High School, remained in student government at SOU and was involved in campus issues outside of football.

The coach and the quarterback soon became friends, sharing a mutual respect that has endured.

"We laughed a lot," Sayre recalled. "Mark is just always in a good mood."

Seventeen years later, Helfrich and Sayre remain close. They try to connect as much as possible, but growing families and demanding careers make that difficult at times.

Sayre is now the athletic director at SOU, where he proudly welcomed Helfrich into the athletic department's hall of fame in October. From 180 miles south of Eugene, Sayre keeps tabs on his good friend who, as Oregon's offensive coordinator, has helped lead the Ducks through the best four-year stretch in school history.

Helfrich now appears destined to take over the reins of one of the most successful college programs in the nation. He is the presumed successor to Chip Kelly, who is leaving Eugene to become head coach of the NFL's Philadelphia Eagles.

Soon enough, football might be a difficult topic for Helfrich and Sayre to avoid.

"I think he'd make a fantastic head coach," Sayre said.

Rooted in Oregon

Mark Helfrich has roots in Oregon that stretch farther than the Willamette River, his connections running from Coos Bay, his hometown, to Ashland to Eugene.

Now a 39-year-old father of two, Helfrich grew up rooting for the Ducks, spending many a weekend making the 2 1/2-hour drive from the coast to Autzen Stadium with his family.

His father, Mike Helfrich, played on the offensive line for Oregon's freshman team in the early 1960s, blocking for future All-American Mel Renfro. Mike Helfrich would go on to finish his college career at SOU, then become a respected banker in Coos Bay and beloved volunteer assistant coach for 15 years at Marshfield.

When Helfrich rejoined the UO staff in 2009, his father became a regular at Oregon games. Mike Helfrich died suddenly of natural causes at 68, in a Tucson, Ariz., hotel room hours before he was to attend the Oregon-Arizona game on Sept. 24, 2011.

The last time Mark Helfrich saw his father alive was the day before that game in an entryway to the Casanova Center, Oregon's athletic department building. He said he thinks about his father every single day when he walks through that space.

"Which is a good thing," Helfrich said. "... Whether it's coaching or coworkers or friends or players, he's a great role model for so many people."

Helfrich and his older brother, John, recently created a Marshfield scholarship endowment in their father's honor.

Helfrich's mother, Linda, lives in a Coos Bay care facility while battling Huntington's disease. She attended Oregon's game against Tennessee Tech in September, the first game she'd been to since her husband's death.

"She's unbelievably tough," Helfrich said. "She's tougher than all of us, that's for sure."

After graduating from Marshfield in 1992, Helfrich went to SOU with initial designs on a career as a doctor. By the end of his injury-plagued playing career there, he said he didn't feel like he'd filled his football fixation. So he remained in Ashland and got his first coaching gig in 1996 as a graduate assistant at his alma mater.

He then spent one season as a quarterback/coach of the Vienna (Austria) Vikings in the winter of 1997. Later that year, then-Oregon coach Mike Bellotti, through a connection to legendary Marshfield coach and Helfrich family friend Kent Wigle, offered Helfrich a spot on Oregon's coaching staff as a graduate assistant. Helfrich jumped at it.

It was his first big break in coaching, and his career "just took off" from there, he said.

"It was awesome," Helfrich said of his first tenure with the Ducks. "It was complete luck how that all shook out. I had just gotten done playing in Austria, and I came back and a position opened up here. There's a lot of luck to do with this profession and the timing of everything, and that was no exception."

As a UO grad assistant, he worked closely with Dirk Koetter, then Oregon's offensive coordinator. When Koetter got the head-coaching job at Boise State in 1998, Helfrich followed him, becoming the Broncos' quarterbacks coach. Helfrich would follow Koetter again when Koetter took over at Arizona State in 2001.

Helfrich, then 32, became an offensive coordinator for the first time at Colorado in 2006, a job he would hold for three seasons until Chip Kelly offered him a job as Oregon's offensive coordinator/quarterbacks coach in 2009.

Helfrich has reveled in Oregon's success during his four seasons on the staff, helping the blur offense consistently rank among the fastest and most productive in all of football. The Ducks have appeared in four consecutive BCS bowl games, and Helfrich has been instrumental in the development of redshirt freshman quarterback Marcus Mariota, who has all the makings of being an all-time great for the Ducks.

All indications are Helfrich is plenty content in Eugene.

"I'm so excited and happy and lucky to be where I am. I try to earn that every day," Helfrich told The Oregonian in September. "There's a lot of time spent on things that don't matter. And happiness and being lucky and being where we are do matter."

Raider for life

Jeff Olson remembers Mark Helfrich as a dual-threat quarterback who earned playing time -- and teammates' respect -- almost immediately after arriving at Southern Oregon in 1992.

Then an SOU assistant coach, Olson said they would tease each other often, with Olson often needling the quarterback about his rail-thin frame.

"He's got some of the skinniest calves in America," Olson said, laughing. "His calves are not big enough to hold his socks up."

Helfrich's actions and his words carried plenty of weight around the SOU campus, though.

"He's just a natural-born leader," said Olson, describing the young quarterback as humble and charismatic. "He's the kind of guy people rallied around."

On the field, Helfrich broke many of the school's offensive records as a sophomore in 1993, earning honorable-mention NAIA All-American honors. Many of his records stood until they were broken this year by SOU quarterback Austin Dodge.

"He was surprisingly athletic," Sayre said. "You wouldn't think it looking at him, but he could move around pretty well."

Helfrich used up his playing eligibility in 1995; by the next season, as he worked toward a master's degree, he was on the coaching staff as the program's first full-fledged graduate assistant. Olson, soon after his promotion to head coach, had pitched the idea to SOU administrators, who Olson said were more than happy to approve of a stipend for Helfrich in the new role.

This past October, Helfrich couldn't make it to Ashland for his induction ceremony into the SOU hall of fame -- the Ducks played host to Colorado that day at Autzen Stadium -- so he did a live, three-minute webcast from the Casanova Center.

Sayre and Olson were among the many Helfrich thanked during the short ceremony.

Helfrich called Sayre "one of the best people in the world I know" and "a guy I've modeled my life after in a lot of ways."

Sayre is thankful his friend has remained close to him and SOU.

"He's very loyal and very supportive," Sayre said.

Time in Eugene

The one knock against Helfrich, fair or not, is that he doesn't call Oregon's offensive plays. Kelly has called the shots.

"I've learned a ton from him," Helfrich said. "We have a great working relationship. If we didn't have a great working relationship, I could see how some people might take it (as a negative). But we do have a great relationship, and if we win or if we lose, we do that together. I don't worry about that other stuff."

Some have described Helfrich as a sort of unsung hero of the Oregon offense.

"This is (Kelly's) system, people know this, so they automatically think Helfrich has little input on what happens on Saturdays. This is simply not true," former UO quarterback Nate Costa told CBSsports.com last fall. "Helfrich doesn't get half the credit he deserves. He is one of the smartest people in the college football world and has a great football mind. He has a large amount of involvement in the game planning, scripting and coaching on a weekly basis.

"He may not call all the plays on game day, but he has a high amount of input in what plays are called and why they are called."

Now, once Oregon complies with a state law that requires interviewing a minority candidate, Helfrich is in line to take over in Eugene, according to sources.

Olson, the former SOU head coach, laughed when he was reminded that he gave Helfrich his start in the coaching ranks more than 16 years ago.

"That was a stroke of genius, wasn't it?"

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