Aliotti goes out with a splash

Oregon Ducks safeties Erick Dargan (4) and Avery Patterson (21) -- both from Nick Aliotti's hometown of Pittsburg, Calif. -- give Nick Aliotti a Gatorade bath after a win during his last game as the defensive coordinator.

(Thomas Boyd/The Oregonian)

EUGENE — One week after his retirement as Oregon’s defensive coordinator, Nick Aliotti was on a family friend’s property near Chico, Calif., with a gun.

Together with his 85-year-old father, three brothers and brother-in-law, the men of the Aliotti family went bird hunting.

The early January trip is a family staple, joined by a July counterpart that sees the men golf for four days in South Lake Tahoe before a two-day, all-family tournament caps the week.

“The brothers are always together,” said Joe Aliotti, the third-oldest brother in the five-sibling family. “We cook, we hunt and we just enjoy each other and do the things that we love to do.

"We play cards, have a little bit of alcohol, hunt birds and eat. What’s better to do?”

For the Aliottis, football is intertwined with family, and the two established their yearly rhythms. The outings have been scheduled for years primarily around Nick's duties of coaching and recruiting. Just how tightly are the two enmeshed? Joe Aliotti’s daughter expressly scheduled her 300-person wedding for this month because it fell during a no-contact period for recruiting.

In turn, family is intertwined with Northern California’s Bay Area, centered on the childhood East Bay home of the Aliottis that is within a stone’s throw of Pittsburg High. During his 24 years at Oregon, Nick Aliotti used deep connections earned by the confluence of those interests — football, family, geography — as a way to tap into one of the Ducks’ most important reservoirs of talent in recruiting.

At Oregon, that hunt now carries on without Aliotti.

But just as he seeks ways to fill the void of his normal routine in January and February, Oregon embarks on the final month of recruiting while also replacing Aliotti’s deep connections in the Bay Area, an historically important recruiting area. Multiple sources close to the program indicated Saturday morning his replacement will be Don Pellum, the 1985 UO graduate who has coached defense for the Ducks for 21 years, most recently the inside linebackers.

He will bring an intimate knowledge of how Oregon handles its business on the field and the recruiting trail, but burnishing ties to the Bay Area like Aliotti could be the hardest aspect to replace. Coaches can contact recruits from Jan. 16-Feb. 1. Recruits can sign National Letters of Intent starting Feb. 5.

“We’re all replaceable,” said Ed Hall, who has known Aliotti since 1983 and has coached at California, De La Salle High and Diablo Valley College for more than 30 years.

“The thing is, though, when you change, a new defensive coordinator will come in and I’m sure he’ll be a lights-out guy, but the thing is when a guy’s been there that long and with that networking, he doesn’t have the Rolodex Nick does. That takes time. Those relationships are everything.”

The brand

It isn’t to suggest Aliotti was undefeated on his home turf – Mark Helfrich used to recruit the area for Arizona State, too, and well. Some of it was practical, such as knowing the most time-efficient route to hit as many schools in a day as possible. But he also carried a name brand no one else could match in the East Bay: Aliotti.

“I’m not going to lie, he’s top notch because he’s coming from one of the top programs in the country and then the whole aspect, as far as my kids are concerned, is he walked these same hallways,” said Victor Galli, head coach at Pittsburg High. “He played on this same field.”

In some cases, the relationships are as embedded as deeply as a tree root. All four Aliotti brothers worked as stockboys growing up at The Silver Knight, a liquor store owned by the father of Galli. Galli has coached at Pittsburg for a dozen years, during which time Aliotti has signed defenders such as Avery Patterson, Erick Dargan and Ra’Shon Harris.

Then there’s Joe Aliotti, who coached and taught at Pittsburg High for a decade before leaving for vaunted De La Salle of Concord, where he has been dean of students and assisted with football for 18 years. It was during that run that De La Salle won a national-record 151 games in a row, and recruiters arrived in droves.

Including his brother.

Nick Aliotti at Virginia, during his final season.

“I never asked anyone to go to Oregon, never will,” said Joe Aliotti, who led Boise State to the 1980 Division I-AA national title and was inducted into the school’s hall of fame eight years later. From De La Salle, Oregon found success recruiting Cameron Colvin, the nation’s top-rated wideout in 2003, and T.J. Ward and Demetrius Williams, who enjoyed success in the NFL. He does not deny they were extremely close: Nick called Joe every fall Friday before each brother's football team played, and Joe called after every UO victory, leaving the same voicemail for his brother: "Quack, quack, Duckies win!"

But when it came to referring De La Salle's athletes, he says he became Switzerland in recruiting's turf war.

“What's the best fit for them?” Joe Aliotti said. “They always say, ‘Hey your brother is the defensive coordinator, could he recruit me?’ I tell them, ‘If he thinks you're good enough, he'll tell you.’ ”

The strategy for Aliotti, and Oregon

Aliotti’s secret in recruiting was that he had none.

Those near the process say his personality with teenagers is the same as during his blunt postgame press conferences. In the last decade, at least 47 players on UO’s roster hailed from the area between San Francisco and Sacramento, and many were won this way.

Hall, whose office at Diablo Valley College is just a 20-minute drive east from Berkeley, has known Aliotti long enough to call him “Nicky” but said his recruiting methods are the same as they were in the 1980s. Just this fall, Aliotti attended several practices to observe defensive end Tui Talia – rated the No. 1 player at his position in junior college – who gave Oregon his binding commitment in mid-December.

“He’s not cute and he’s not clever,” Hall said of Aliotti. “He’s just drop-dead honest.”

Blake Ferras witnessed each side of Aliotti at City College of San Francisco. He left there to go to Oregon because of Aliotti’s recruitment, and now coaches at the school.

“His first question when he would come in and meet with us was, ‘Do you love football?’ and if you didn’t speak right away he’d get upset and say ‘you’d better love football if you come up to Oregon,’ ” Ferras said. “Football is his passion.”

The change at defensive coordinator comes after Oregon altered how and where it recruits during the transition from Mike Bellotti to Chip Kelly. Pellum primarily coordinates defensive recruiting, and receivers coach Matt Lubick is his offensive counterpart. It's done by position -- Pellum will go anywhere to see a talented linebacker with genuine interest -- though coaches with strong geographic connections certainly don't sever them.

"You try to take advantage of both," said Pellum, who added his deepest recruiting ties are in the Long Beach, Calif., area. "The advantage of position recruiting is the position coach gets to evaluate them and build a relationship with that young man. That’s very powerful. You also try to take advantage of our stuff where we’ve had guys recruiting the same areas for a long time, and you try to use those relationships as much as possible."

That’s why Jeff Lockie, a quarterback from Alamo, Calif. – 20 minutes east of Oakland – said Aliotti contacted him first before telling Oregon’s offensive coaches to take a look.

As Oregon’s national cachet has risen with its rankings, so has its reach with potential players, and the areas around the Bay Area and Los Angeles area are no longer UO’s sole pipelines. Tony James, a running back expected to sign Feb. 5, was pulled from the University of Florida’s backyard in Gainesville.

“Nowadays, they recruit so much nationally it’s more diluted by sheer roster numbers, but the greater Bay Area is No. 2” in producing most UO recruits, behind L.A., said recruiting analyst A.J. Jacobson of Duck Sports Authority.

“Texas, though, is getting a lot and Florida, too, but I don’t think they’ll ever get away from California and the guys who are an easy flight away.

Nick’s familiar with the area, but I bet you (linebackers coach) Don Pellum knows his way around. These guys will all learn it, but anytime you lose a long-term guy, you can’t replace it all.”

The next step is filling that void with something else, for both Oregon and Nick Aliotti. For their part, the Ducks have apparently found Pellum. Joe does not believe his brother has the itch to coach again, instead believing he’d do well as a television analyst. But such conversations did not come up during last week’s hunt, as Nick stalked the land in search of a bird, instead of a school hallway to find a recruit.

But though it may have gone unspoken, his ties to the Bay Area and Eugene were still in peak form.

“I think it'll hit him later, he was only out seven days,” Joe Aliotti said. “I don't know if it's hit him yet. He didn't change, Nick was still Nick. He bleeds, besides the black and orange of Pittsburg High, the green and yellow of Oregon.”