SAN ANTONIO -- Full tackling rarely happens in Oregon's football practices anymore in 11-on-11 scenarios, let alone one-on-one drills.

Tight end Pharaoh Brown, then, had no reason to expect he'd get taken to the ground while running a routine slant route during a Ducks' mid-December practice. Then reserve cornerback Ty Griffin "rolled me up from the back," and the 6-foot-6 Brown -- 13 months removed from massive knee surgery -- was on the ground, much to his surprise.

"He tangled up my legs," Brown said Tuesday, "and I fell."

Would his first full-contact hit since the November 2014 night of his gruesome injury shred any of the progress he and Kim Terrell, Oregon's associate director of athletic medicine, had worked so hard for?

"Everybody kind of looked stunned and then when I popped right up everybody was OK," Brown said. "Our sports science guy was like, 'You're lucky Miss Kim didn't see that, she would have lost it.' That was the first time I really got hit."

Brown remains on track to take many more in the 2016 college football season.

Calling his progress "slow and steady," Brown redshirted this season and will return to compete in his final year of eligibility next season.

"There's no doubt that he'll do everything he can do to get ready to play," tight ends coach Tom Osborne said. "Football is so important to him and he wants to do well, so bad there's no doubt he'll work his tail off from the training room and rehab perspective to get himself ready."

The development has been in the works for a while -- in February, just three months after the injury, he was walking without aid, and by September his role in practices was limited -- but it's nonetheless the latest chapter in a remarkable recovery for a player

of his lower leg due to blood loss.

Asked if there is anything he can't do, Brown said, "not really."

And asked if he can return to the all-Pac-12 level he was playing at before the injury, Brown said: "With our offense the way they use me, there's no question about it."

"I have an opportunity now to have 18 months of a full rehab," he said. "... It gives me time to now fall back and just take it slow, and make sure everything is right. A lot of times coming back you hurt something else and a lot of people feel pain and I haven't got any of those things. I'm just taking it slow."

At times, the season felt like it was going by agonizingly slow, too, as Brown coped with something he'd never done before: Watch football games from his couch.

When the Ducks traveled, Brown stayed home and watched with friends, where he telegraphed to his non-football playing friends what Oregon was about to run based on formations. Sitting out wasn't easy, and Brown related the experience as "weird," but he wasn't sitting idly by, either, as he worked out typically five days a week.

"It's hard to be engaged all the time when you know you're not going to play the whole season," Osborne said. "Every day, week in and week out, every meeting, that's hard for anybody to do that.

"But he's done well for a guy who's been hurt and knows he won't play. I've been very happy with that."

Brown's rehab hasn't been one of counting down toward milestones to pass; he's approached it as a oft-grueling "day by day" process that has, at times, produced more patience than extra degrees of flexibility in his leg. Whereas his recovery began by working on strengthening his knee, it's now focused on gaining strength in the muscles surrounding it.

"Every time I go out there my speed comes back, I get a little faster," he said. "My knee is perfectly fine, it's just everything else. My quad just has to get its muscle back, my glute is just kind of weak."

And yet, with each passing day, Brown is feeling stronger than ever.

-- Andrew Greif

agreif@oregonian.com

@andrewgreif