EUGENE -- Bronco Mendenhall wasn't there in 2007 when everything changed for Oregon's football program, the night a team retreat began with bickering and ended with a bonfire.

Yet his influence -- only months after the then-BYU coach handed Oregon its worst bowl loss in a decade -- was all over the moment that purged UO's damaged psyche and changed the program's direction.

Former coach Mike Bellotti still refers to it less as a team meeting and more "a team intervention."

"I've been part of millions of team-bonding exercises," said UO offensive line coach Steve Greatwood, who was there that evening, "but nothing that really cut to the core like this one."

Some Ducks fans have likely heard of that cathartic retreat, but everyone knows what followed: The "Win The Day" mantra, coined by Chip Kelly; hopes of a national championship the following season in 2007; seven consecutive 10-win seasons; two appearances in national title games; one Heisman Trophy.

That run might have seemed unfathomable when Oregon coaches, support staffers and players, some still irked from their unfocused and unmotivated bowl loss, arrived by bus at north Eugene's Camp Harlow on a winter evening.

"That day," said former UO offensive lineman Geoff Schwartz, who was entering his junior season, "changed the program."

The events that led to the intervention are the stories of the 2006 Las Vegas Bowl and the clear-the-air meeting it led to, two program-altering nights linked by Mendenhall's pivotal, yet hidden, role.

When Mendenhall, now in his first season coaching Virginia (0-1), arrives at Autzen Stadium on Saturday ahead of a 7:30 p.m. matchup with No. 24 Oregon (1-0), he will be leading a Cavaliers team attempting to find its identity.

Few know how important he was in helping the Ducks create their own.

LAS VEGAS

Undefeated and ranked 11th after four games of the 2006 season, Oregon appeared to be riding, unabated, the positive energy from its 10-2 season the year prior.

Instead, it closed the regular season by losing five of its last eight, with four losses by double-digit margins. To twist the knife, a 30-28 Civil War loss in Corvallis was bitterly close. Oregon's potential game-winning field goal blocked with 20 seconds remaining.

Players say the offensive play-calling went stale and chemistry was nonexistent. They saw a communication disconnect between the locker room and the coaches' offices, inequity in player treatment and a belief that Bellotti's open-door policy wasn't as welcoming in practice as it was in theory.

This was the state of the Ducks upon arriving at the palatial team hotel, the Venetian, in the days before the Vegas Bowl. Several used the occasion to say goodbye to a season of lost potential by letting loose on The Strip.

BYU kept a lower profile.

In his second year since his promotion from defensive coordinator to coach, Mendenhall housed his team, with its school Honor Code restrictions against drinking, instead at the low-wattage Golden Nugget, a casino and resort in an older section of downtown. When the teams did meet at a pregame function, and BYU players began the "Haka" ritual dance, a UO lineman jumped a barrier, going chest-to-chest before being pulled back. For more motivation, the Cougars and their fans latched onto a radio interview in which Bellotti said BYU could not compete with the Pac-10's best teams.

"Bad week of practice," Schwartz said. "They're sleeping, we're partying."

Four days before Christmas and wearing metallic yellow helmets with a flame pattern, Oregon looked bad and played worse, losing 38-8 to BYU after being shut out the first three quarters.

BYU's quarterback called the victory a "dream fulfilled," while Mendenhall said it was "the next step in our evolution to being a great program."

From Oregon's perspective, Schwartz remembers it as "a complete smackdown."



Recalled Ryan DePalo, a reserve safety: "We went in there and just got handled."

"Basically," Bellotti said, "that game made me sick to my stomach for months."

In hindsight, the rout was a blessing in disguise. Afterward, Bellotti told reporters the offseason would require a thorough search for answers after being "outplayed, outcoached" and embarrassed. Looking for some answers of his own, UO defensive backs coach John Neal sought out a friend for advice.

Mendenhall.

Oregon coach Mike Bellotti (left) congratulates BYU's Bronco Mendenhall following BYU's 38-8 win in the 2006 Las Vegas Bowl. The two would talk again within months of the game.

THE SPARK

Before Mendenhall began his first spring practice as head coach at BYU in 2005, he loaded the team onto buses.

Fourteen players were suspended due to violations of the school's Honor Code the year prior to Mendenhall's promotion, and the Cougars needed a culture change. A campfire was waiting when the buses arrived in the hills of Provo Canyon, where players split into groups and were handed pieces of paper. On them, according to BYU Magazine, they wrote down their gripes about a program coming off three consecutive losing seasons.

Then they threw the papers into the fire.

Neal had heard about that meeting. He had played with Mendenhall's brother at BYU before graduating in 1980, then was Mendenhall's position coach with the defensive backs at Oregon State in the late 1980s. Mendenhall later was an OSU graduate assistant in 1990, where he worked under current UO defensive coordinator Brady Hoke, and returned to Corvallis to coach from 1995-96.

When they met again at the annual coaching convention in the weeks after the Vegas Bowl, it felt like a role reversal. As Neal listened to his convention speech, Mendenhall sounded like the teacher.

"I was really lost at the time and searching for answers for the program, for whatever role I had," said Neal, who had joined Oregon to coach the secondary in 2003. "(Bronco) was beyond brilliant."

Knowing Bellotti's urgent mandate to bring in new ideas, Neal asked about BYU's turnaround.

"I recall it like yesterday," Mendenhall said this week. "I shared a lot of the best practices, the things that we were doing that I thought might be helpful to any program that might be looking for a change."

When Neal brought the recommendations back to Eugene, Bellotti was intrigued and wanted more specifics. He followed up with a phone call to Mendenhall.

"He said, 'Here were certain things we did and certain concepts and certain ideas,'" Bellotti said. "We put together this idea of a team intervention."

He told the UO coaches that BYU's team-building exercise was the inspiration for what was about to happen, Greatwood said.

But, Bellotti added, "I didn't tell the team anything."

THE INTERVENTION

The Ducks' version of Provo Canyon was Camp Harlow, an idyllic retreat facility a 10-minute drive north from Autzen Stadium that hosts corporate types and kids camps alike. Players were told to show up at the team facility in the early evening with no other details given. Then the buses rolled out.

Once at Harlow, Bellotti asked every player to write him a private letter, to share any thoughts they might have. The team then dove into the BYU playbook, splitting into small groups, writing everything good about the program on one sheet of parchment paper, and everything bad on another.

That led to a discussion of how the program would fix what ailed it, with the ground rule that no one player or coach was more important than any other. Free of the team's hierarchy, the group talk quickly became a forum to air pent-up frustrations.

"It kind of started like any other sort of exercise in team unity, but Bellotti just kept pressing it and pretty sure you could see the players start to buy in, coaches start to buy in," Greatwood said. "Players called out, coaches called out. It picked open a lot of scabs and let the dirty laundry out and got things that guys had been keeping to themselves brought to the surface.

Oregon offensive lineman Geoff Schwartz, during happier times in the 2006 season. Oregon started the season 4-0, including a controversial 34-33 win against Oklahoma, but then lost six of its final nine games of the season, including its last four.

"It was probably one of the most cleansing experiences that I have ever been through in my career."

Watching all of this unfold was Chip Kelly, the new offensive coordinator who'd arrived that week from New Hampshire.

"Nothing was off limits," Schwartz said. "He probably thought, 'What have I got myself into?'"

Bellotti felt players were misinformed in their critiques of coaches not supporting them enough. Players, in turn, felt they hadn't been heard. It was at once relieving and stinging.

"It was tough at times," Bellotti said.

Entering his 12th season at the helm, Bellotti had guided Oregon to unprecedented success only five seasons earlier by finishing with a No. 2 ranking after a near-miss at playing in the BCS title game. The Ducks were innovative, building the conference's first indoor practice center in 1998, and flashy. Their donor cash, ever-changing uniforms and victories had bought cachet amid college football's traditional powers, a place the program had rarely occupied. After beating Michigan in 2003, Sports Illustrated put UO on its cover with the tagline, "Rich, cool and 4-0."

As they gathered at Harlow, players weren't sure what they were anymore.

"A big part of that meeting was trying to find our new identity," DePalo said.

Those who attended recall the meeting lasting until close to midnight, and by the end, "the atmosphere changed," DePalo said. The team workshopped a handful of mantras they pledged to live by that Kelly boiled down -- either that night or in the days afterward, depending on the retelling -- into three words: "Win the day."

At the beginning, Schwartz remembers "a mutual distaste on how things were going." When it ended, coaches and players "both realized that we wanted things to be different."

Like BYU's meeting on the mountain, Oregon's night ended with a bonfire.

Bellotti didn't stop at torching the parchment paper filled with the program's ills -- he threw in gear from the Vegas Bowl, too.

"The symbolism of, we're leaving it all here," Greatwood said, "and moving forward."

Bellotti couldn't move on just yet, though, staying awake until "1 or 2 in the morning" reading the letters. One player's message was disbelieving: I don't think you'll read this. Tap me on the shoulder at weights if you did.

The next morning, as players lifted weights, Bellotti tapped the player in question on the shoulder.

THE MOMENT IT ALL CHANGED

Oregon raced to a No. 2 ranking the following season before injuries scuttled its shot at a title-game appearance and a possible Heisman Trophy for quarterback Dennis Dixon, who'd emerged from an ineffective dual-quarterback rotation in 2006 a changed player. But future success came quickly.

Since 2007, Oregon's 98 victories are fourth-most in the country behind only Alabama, Boise State and Ohio State.

"I'm not sure a lot of programs have a moment you can point to when things got better," said Schwartz, who has played six seasons in the NFL and co-authored a new book about football and his family, "Eat My Schwartz," this month. "We definitely have a moment."

Yet until they were contacted this week, players involved believed that moment was a master stroke of team psychology conceived by Bellotti.

"The fact (Mendenhall) would say, 'Here's something we did, here are the tools,' to build a program that is not even his program, that means a lot," DePalo said.

Bellotti will call Saturday's Oregon-Virginia game as an ESPN television analyst, a role he's held since 2010. Just because he never told the players about where the idea came from, he says, doesn't mean he's never privately thanked Mendenhall for the counsel at a critical time.

"I owe John Neal's friendship to Bronco Mendenhall and my ability to reach out," Bellotti said. "I respect Bronco Mendenhall and what he accomplished at BYU. I'm not unwilling to beg, borrow or steal ideas from anybody out there in the coaching profession."

Mendenhall was keeping tabs the whole time from afar. Neal had looped him in about the intervention's positive results.

"It was very rewarding for me to be able to contribute and help a friend," Mendenhall said. "But also, another program."

This offseason, Mendenhall has tried jumpstarting his new program at Virginia by installing an uptempo offense and recruiting a graduate transfer to start at quarterback, tactics that Oregon did not pioneer yet has become the national face for.

If even the slightest bit of Mendenhall's inspiration for those moves was drawn from Oregon, it would be a fitting trade of ideas nine years after he lit a fire under the Ducks -- twice.

First he helped beat them down.

Then he helped build them back up.

-- Andrew Greif

agreif@oregonian.com

@andrewgreif