Former coach, author talks about Ducks’ rise, fall and the era that changed college football

John Neal approached writing a book about University of Oregon football the way you’d expect a man who spent four decades coaching football to approach it.

He got a whiteboard.

Neal, 69, mapped out seasons, recruiting classes, games and stories from his years with the Ducks, trying to make sense of a run that stretched from Oregon’s climb into a national power through the end of the Pac-12 itself.

“The preparation was exactly as a coach,” Neal said. “Details. Small details.”

Eventually, the former UO defensive backs coach filled those details into “Won the Day,” his new book about the coaches, players and moments behind one of the most consequential eras in Oregon football history.

The book is coming out later this month.

First, Neal spoke with Lookout Eugene-Springfield for an extended Q&A about how Oregon’s success happened, how it eventually came apart, the legacy of Oregon’s “Win the Day” era and what he thinks about Chip Kelly wearing purple. 

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Lookout Eugene-Springfield: I know why you would want to tell the story of that era at Oregon. But what made you decide, I need to be the one to write this book?

John Neal: I have a great answer. When I first thought about this, I was going to call it “95 Years.” The point being that it took 95 years for Oregon to win a (second) Rose Bowl championship.

When the breakup of the league started, and it started moving around — who knows what was going to happen, who’s getting left out, who’s moving on — it dissolved the Pac-8, 10 and 12 and left it with nothing. There was a Pac-2. It was very insulting to see Washington State and Oregon State in their own little league and everybody else moving on.

I thought about all of it, what it took to win one 95 years later. And then I was a part of two more (Rose Bowl) wins.

I didn’t want to lose that. Where do the records go? Where do Marcus Mariota’s records go and Jonathan Stewart’s records go? They just disappear forever?

Marcus Mariota was here. Again. So, why does he keep coming back?

So I was very motivated to tell the story, with the idea that nobody knows the stuff I wrote. It’s all inside stories. How the helmets got created. How and why the uniforms changed. I was in these meetings when all of our facilities changed.

All this stuff happened while we were also taking Chip Kelly and doing what he was doing and completely reinventing football, on and off the field. And those things are still in place.

I wanted to tie that all together and make sure that these players and coaches were just not dissolved like the league was.

You began at Oregon in 2003. What was Oregon like when you got there?

It took me three times — basically my fourth time — to get there. 

I interviewed and didn’t get the job. I was going to get an interview another time and turned the interview down. My third interview, I was promised something and it didn’t happen. I said, “I’m not interviewing anymore.”

I was at UAB. We were as good as anybody in the country. We had just beaten Nick Saban at LSU. We were really good, and Oregon wasn’t.

Oregon had almost the worst pass defense in the country statistically, almost the worst in scoring. They had just gotten beat by Wake Forest. At that moment, I think my credibility as a coach was even greater because they were looking for answers, and I tried to present myself as an answer.

So when I got there, there was no confidence. Really disheveled. They had come from those two great teams in 2000 and 2001 — great football teams that changed Oregon for quite a long time — to a little bit of a disaster.

One of the stories I tell is when I first met Keith Lewis, who was an all-conference player for us. I called him into my office, shut the door and said, “Hey, you’re not as good as you think you are.”

And I was really serious. It wasn’t like I was playing head games. I said, “You couldn’t have started for me at UAB.”

Well, I had four NFL players at UAB that no one knew about.

From then on, I think Keith had an understanding. I make a point that great players will listen to the truth about themselves because they want to be great. That’s what Keith was.

I was very fortunate that I got to come when it was down, and then it builds up. It makes you look like you know what you’re doing.

I got good players. That’s what I did.

What’s the simplest way to describe why you were effective at developing players?

It’s always hard to talk about yourself, but I was extremely fundamental.

How you tackle: We tackled more than anybody in the United States. There’s no question about it. The hardest skill in football is tackling, and you can’t make it up.

I watched a game the other day, and I have never seen so many missed tackles. My mind is, “Well, because you don’t practice it.” You put the big helmets on. You’re scared to get hurt. And tackling is this vicious, multimovement skill. It’s space. It’s close. It’s someone trying to run you over. 

So I worked on that daily.

That was probably No. 1.

No. 2 is simplicity.

Nick Aliotti (Oregon’s longtime defensive coordinator) was a math major and had that mathematical mind. I sat in the back of the classroom, and my teachers gave me C’s because I was a good athlete, and they were my coaches.

So you had that mix of Nick going, “Look, we can do this and do that,” and I’d say, “No, we can’t. I can only do what I can teach.”

We had a really good agreement that neither of us would try to implement things that I couldn’t go into a room and teach.

Make it as simple as possible so they really know it. Give them enough reps so they get good at it. Tackling. Getting off blocks. Playing man coverage. Bump-and-run.

I threw more deep balls, I’ll bet you, than anyone on Earth. Deep balls after deep balls after deep balls.

When you’re a DB facing a receiver and you get in position, you can finally turn and look for the ball. The problem is the receiver has never taken his eyes off the ball. You have to turn and find it.

You see the failure of that all the time. DBs are somewhat in position, they fall all over the place, the receiver makes a one-handed catch and scores, and everybody hates DB coaches.

So that was my formula: Don’t make it complicated.

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What was the most challenging part of the book for you? Was there a certain era or chapter that took more out of you?

When we started to fail.

Because I was part of the failure. Flat out. Everybody hear me: I was part of the failure.

I couldn’t do what I did before in terms of trying to change the culture. When (Mark Helfrich) got hired, we had a lot of guys who weren’t part of “Win the Day” anymore, and that culture kind of changed and started going its own way.

We hired new coaches, and those new coaches weren’t a part of it. The old coaches wanted to do it one way. When things started to fall apart, I was vocal. I was a vocal coach in meeting rooms.

And I’d have been the first out, too. I don’t blame them if they would have gotten rid of me. But we all got canned at the same time.

That was the hard part because I didn’t want to point fingers. I didn’t want to blame guys.

Two years earlier you’re in the national championship game, and two years later everyone is saying, “Let’s get these guys out of here.” For a group of coaches who had been there so long and had so much success together, how hard was it to come to grips with that being the ending to your time at Oregon?

It was miserable. Absolutely miserable.

To know I’m on a sinking ship that’s going to sink, and I know it’s sinking, and no matter what I do, I’m part of it.

I tried. Whatever it was, it didn’t work.

So it was really frustrating, really gut-wrenching. But I learned a lot from it. I learned how quickly people can turn on each other.

But I’m going to tell you, it started with this one thing called the quarterback conundrum.

The minute Marcus Mariota became a superstar, we couldn’t recruit a quarterback. So whose fault is that? I don’t know.

At one point, we’re going to get Kyler Murray. That’s a story. I can’t give the details because I only heard things, and I can’t talk about things I only heard, but this guy was never coming here unless we drove a Brinks armored car to Texas and brought him home in it. He was never coming here.

But that got out: Oregon’s going to get this guy who never lost a game in high school. He’s a superstar. We’re going to get him.

It scared off other people.

But we got Vernon Adams. That was all Matt Lubick. Matt Lubick completely did this on his own. It was remarkable what he did. And that almost saved the program.

We’re going into that TCU game up 31-0 at half, and Vernon got hurt earlier in the game. Him and the center. When we walked in at halftime, he was like he was unconscious on the table. He wasn’t, but it was kind of like he was. All the players walked by him looking at him like, “Is he alive?” I don’t know if that was the impression they got, but I did.

From then on, you know the rest of the story.

Then he left. We brought in Dakota Prukop from Montana State. We lost a couple games early, they benched him, and we brought in Justin Herbert as a true freshman. He wasn’t quite ready.

I called it the quarterback conundrum because it kept happening.

Then once we lost that continuation, we lost that part of our team.

We lost our defense. We went from a defense that me and Nick and Don Pellum had been running forever. Things started to fall off a little bit, and then when we hired Brady Hoke, gone.

That wasn’t our defense. I didn’t even know what it was. I didn’t know what he was doing.

I’ll put that out there because that’s in the book. I wasn’t easy on him.

And I think some guys come back because of the money. I really believe that about some older guys. Look how much money they’re making. There are coordinators making $3 million in college.

I’m just telling you: No coach is worth that. None.

When the money started getting really big, even for me, I was scared. I hated it. Because I’m going, “What if I don’t get paid like that anymore? I’m not going to be living like this forever.”

You don’t want to get used to living like you’re a multimillionaire. I wasn’t, but some guys are now.

I find the current era fascinating. You look at Indiana last year and how quickly a program can transform now through the transfer portal and NIL.

For you guys, from 2003 through 2016 — and really that longer rise before playoff expansion — Oregon seemed like the one program outside the traditional powers that figured out a way to break into that club. It took decades.

How do you view the challenge you guys faced compared to the current era, where, if the money is there, you can flip a roster so quickly?

I used to have to watch film, and I’m watching Patrick Chung, for example, and he’s (tiny) on the film. I can hardly see him.

But he made one play. That’s it. One play on a kickoff. I recruited him from one play.

This whole new thing (with NIL and the transfer portal) is its own capsule. Someone said Dan Lanning’s the best coach in Oregon history. I said, “No, he’s not. He’s not the best coach in Oregon history. He’s the best coach in modern history.”

That’s going to have to be judged by whoever follows him. But you can’t go back in time and compare these apples-and-oranges things because he is really good. I think Dan Lanning was a perfect hire for the change. He was right in the middle of it. He’s perfect. He gets all that stuff, and he’s a great motivator. He does all the other things right, too. And he’s a defensive coach, which I really appreciate.

But the before-and-after things we’re talking about are revealed in the book, and they’ll stay there forever. That was my point. I hope people will treasure it because they were all part of it, too.

What happens here on out is just another story. It’s a new world.

What’s it like seeing Chip wear purple?

I don’t even think about stuff like that. I hope he does well.

Why Chip moves around a lot and stuff is kind of a mystery. But Chip’s a mystery.

Chip is, intellectually and in his own way, the smartest football coach I’ve ever been around.

He’s different. He thinks outside the box, whatever that means, and he helped change football.

Why he moved, I don’t know.

But Northwestern just built a billion-dollar stadium. They have tons of money because they have a rich alumni base.

You never know what might come out of there with Chip’s mind offensively and this defensive coach. They won nine games just two years ago.

That could be a lethal combination if they get the right players in order.

You’ve talked about Saban a few times. We’ve talked about Chip. There are these famous head coaches that we in the media throw around as “the best.” But from a coaching perspective, who have you personally been around who was the most impressive coach of your career?

Chip, by far.

He innovated the offense. When that first came that first spring, it was wild.

I almost got killed a couple times because I was trying to coach somebody and they ran the next play. Some receiver is running full speed and doesn’t know there’s a bunch of us standing around talking.

It took me a while to adjust and realize: You know what really is good coaching? Reps. Repetition.

We’re getting repetition, not John Neal talking to some guy who’s half listening to me.

Another thing Chip did was with the footballs. If you look at a cat’s eyes, like a tiger, they have yellow eyes so they can see in the dark. Road construction signs are yellow. Somebody figured out you see yellow better than any other color.

So Chip calls Nike and says, “Would you guys make us some balls with yellow stripes on them?”

Nike can do anything, so we got brown Nike footballs with yellow stripes.

What a cool invention.

Somehow the powers that be nixed it and said, “No, we can’t do it.”

But that’s Chip. He was always thinking about how to do something a little bit different.