Trying to add a payment method? You can do this on the 
If there’s anyone who knows how much is riding on No. 10 Oregon vs. No. 9 UCLA, it’s the long-time Oregon head coach.
UCLA first tried to hire Mike Bellotti after the 1995 season.
If it sounds like an odd pairing for the long-time Oregon coach, keep in mind Bellotti was born in Sacramento and the Bruins’ dominant teams of the 1960s ran parallel to his formative years. UCLA was his dream.
“And then I figured out where it was,” Bellotti says now on the phone from his home in Bend. “‘Wait a second. Los Angeles? I don’t know if I want to live in Los Angeles.’ So I didn’t.”
But in 1995 things had changed. UCLA was a big-time job, much bigger than Oregon at that point, and Bellotti was on the school’s radar after his first year as the Ducks head coach.
“I was interested,” Bellotti says, “but I had just gotten the Oregon job, so I said no and didn’t even pursue it.”
The second time UCLA tried, the Bruins at least got Bellotti to nibble.
This time it was 2007, right after one of the best regular seasons of Bellotti’s 14-year tenure. Had Dennis Dixon not injured his leg late in the year, Bellotti and his relatively new spread offense may have ended up in the national championship game.
And the Bruins wanted a piece.
At that point, Bellotti was one of the longest-tenured coaches in college football, so he entertained a couple of meetings before ultimately issuing this statement:
“You’re always flattered when others want to talk to you, but that’s because of the success we’ve enjoyed based on our players, our support staff and our administration. I have been, and continue to be, 100 percent committed to the University of Oregon and our pursuit of a national championship.”
Bellotti and the Ducks went 9-3 in 2008, then he retired from coaching after win No. 116 — a 42-31 win over No. 13 Oklahoma State in the Holiday Bowl — gave him 25 more victories than anyone in program history.
Two years later under Chip Kelly, the Ducks reached the national championship.
Ask Bellotti what a retired coach does and he’ll tell you it’s really not that complicated.
“I watch football about five days a week,” he says. “Basically, it’s college football or pro football on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday.”
On the football-less Tuesdays and Wednesdays? He might sneak in a recording. This week he still had Alabama and Tennessee to watch, because even now at 71 and 14 years removed from that 35-year coaching career, he’s still got that bug.
And oh boy is he excited for Saturday.
No. 10 Oregon against No. 9 UCLA is the first Pac-12 conference game featuring top 10 opponents since 2018 and just the 15th in the last 30 years. As a member of the Pac-12’s Football Alumni Council, that’s good for business. And if we’re strictly talking Xs and Os, Bellotti says it’s a heck of a matchup.
“This is going to be a great game and it might come down to who has the ball last,” Bellotti said. “They can both run the football. They both defend the run very well. They have mobile quarterbacks that are playing the best football of their lives and they have weapons to put around them. I think UCLA may have a slightly better defense, but Oregon’s played a slightly better schedule and it’s just going be a great game.”
Of course there’s more to this game than just being a good matchup, and nobody knows that better than Bellotti. For the last decade, he’s been the go-to quote for putting the last 30 years of Oregon football into context. He’s great at it — not that there are many other options. In the 14 years since he retired he’s been there to offer his thoughts on the beginnings of Kelly, Mark Helfrich, Willie Taggart, Mario Cristobal and now Dan Lanning.
On Lanning:
“I think he’s done a great job. I think they’ve had some luck, but they’ve also worked at it. I mean, when you look at the Washington State game, maybe that could have gone either way, but the reality is that Georgia game is now way back in the rearview mirror, but you can still talk about it to show how far they’ve come and what they’ve learned from that game. I think they’ve simplified some things to allow the players to play faster and to be confident in what they’re doing. And also, Georgia is just a really, really good team. I think that also gave them a huge dose of humble pie and showed them what they needed to do to play with the best teams in the nation. And now they fought their way back to being a top-10 team.”
That means something to Bellotti. He’s in the UO Athletics and college football hall of fames because of the way he took the foundation Rich Brooks assembled and elevated it. Bellotti was there for the uniforms. He was there for the beginnings of the facilities arms race. Much of what he did came with the thought of an Oregon future without him in the back of his mind. Of the coaches who followed, maybe only Helfrich had similar institutional care — and he was fired after four seasons.
After initially being left in the shadow by the unheralded success Kelly achieved during his four seasons — that 46-7 record is still mind blowing — Bellotti’s legacy at Oregon seemingly only improves as the years go by. Part of that is because he stayed.
Meanwhile, Kelly returns to Autzen with UCLA on Saturday for the second time, though it’s his first time with anything really at stake. Since leaving Oregon, Kelly has been fired by the Philadelphia Eagles and San Francisco 49ers. He’s been up-and-down at UCLA, with 2021’s eight wins serving as the high-water mark.
If the Bruins best the Ducks, Kelly will be back at .500 with the program. Then maybe the rocket blasts off from there.
If the Ducks beat the Bruins, Lanning’s 6-1 start will add a little extra weight to his name in the Oregon yearbooks.
Bellotti will be watching from Autzen.
“It’s going to be a lot of fun,” the coach says.
— Tyson Alger
@tysonalger
