From his time at Stanford, as an assistant, and Western Kentucky and South Florida as head coach, Willie Taggart says that rebuilding football programs typically comes down to fixing many of the same structural issues.

Boosting recruiting, for one. Reforming player discipline, too.

But upon Taggart's hiring at Oregon, he found a problem he hadn't anticipated: The need to coax Ducks players to spend more time in the Hatfield-Dowlin Complex's luxurious, players-only lounge.

Its multiple big-screen televisions, video game consoles, rugs imported from Italy and foosball tables from Spain were apparently barely being used.

"It's a really player-friendly building," Taggart said in a phone interview Wednesday with The Oregonian/OregonLive. "You would think that a lot of these guys would be around here a lot more than what they have been."

The sparse attendance, to Taggart, wasn't reflective of players' unhappiness with their amenities.

Instead, it came off as symptomatic of a 4-8 team where the issue was more team chemistry than talent. Despite all its player perks, UO's high-tech football headquarters is still an office, and players often bolted as soon as their workday was done.

"We've got to learn to like each other," Taggart said, "and love being around each other."

Taggart wouldn't be the first to use the offseason as a time to tinker with team dynamics. Following a disappointing 2016 season, Texas Tech's Kliff Kingsbury this month banned the school's double-T logo, requiring players to earn the privilege to wear it. Last year, new Virginia coach Bronco Mendenhall took players' names off their jerseys until they'd "earned" them back, too. Even Taggart has revoked UO's prized single-digit uniform numbers, for now.

Under Taggart's predecessor, Mark Helfrich, UO brought in various consultants to lead team-building exercises, such as a hike up Lane County's Mount Pisgah in 2014.

But those Oregon teams were winning, and victories tend to smooth over a team's rough spots. Oregon's record last fall was its worst since 1991 and laid bare what players after the season called a culture where selfishness reigned and leadership waned.

In an attempt to unite the Ducks, the roster has been divided into nine "player accountability groups," each led by an assistant who drafted players from all positions as a way of breaking up cliques. In the past, linebackers and running backs might have mingled only when meeting on the line of scrimmage. Now, if one player makes a mistake, the whole group bears the consequences. Taggart first implemented smaller "accountability groups" in 2014 after his second season at South Florida, saying the idea came from assistant Tom Allen (now head coach at Indiana).

An academic error by one player, for example, often lands the whole group in study hall sessions held Friday or Saturday evenings.

"The night where they kind of want to get out and do things on their own," Taggart said. "We're trying to teach our guys to hold each other accountable. They all know who does wrong and who does the right thing, so when we can get those guys to hold each other accountable, that's when we're going to have something special going."

Other events are designed to get players around one another for happier reasons than weekend study hall.

Three times each week, the team meets for 6 p.m. dinners in the Hatfield-Dowlin Complex dining room, events that kick off with a player being chosen at random to deliver a brief address on any current event. Taggart said UO plans to hold a teamwide softball game and tournaments to crown champions in Ping-Pong and the NFL video game Madden.

Players to impress Taggart this offseason include running back Royce Freeman, safety Brenden Schooler and defensive lineman Jalen Jelks.

He praised Jelks for becoming more serious in the classroom, while Schooler is "first in his group and he's leading" the defensive backs. Freeman, the former All-America running back whose return for his senior season marked perhaps Taggart's most important recruiting effort, "is going to lead by example all the time, and I like watching that."

Adding more commitments to athletes' busy schedules can be a tricky line to walk, and UO's offseason moves have come less than a year after the Pac-12 issued a 22-page report that outlined solutions to lessen the demands on athletes' time. When spring practices open April 5 at UO, that free time will decrease even more.

But however it happens, Taggart emphasized the importance of getting players around one another more often, whether it's a formal dinner or an informal Madden session in the players' lounge.

"They've got to be able to look out for each other and respond to adversity in a positive way," Taggart said. "From that standpoint we've got to get better, getting to know each other better and that's not just the players, it's coaches as well.

"As we go through our morning workouts, the one thing that's stood out in the last two workouts that we've had (this week) is it's easy for some of these guys to quit when things get a little tough. It's easy for them to walk away or complain about something that's bothering them and not want to finish things. That stood out the first day and, not necessarily ticked me off, but it threw up a red flag that here's one of the issues. You go back and look at some of the games last year, you've seen that a lot."

What Taggart would rather see this offseason is a players lounge full of Ducks.

-- Andrew Greif

agreif@oregonian.com

@andrewgreif