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QuickTake:
Nearly two decades after launching Oregon into a different stratosphere of college football, the former Ducks quarterback is a fitness instructor and mentor to young athletes in all sports.
PORTLAND — Dennis Dixon remembers every detail.
The black uniforms with the green helmets, the roar of Autzen when the Ducks sprinted out of the tunnel, the buzz across Eugene when Oregon knocked off USC on Halloween weekend in 2007.
Nineteen years ago, Dixon was a 22-year-old senior quarterback starring in an offense engineered by a new offensive coordinator named Chip Kelly. A wizard of an unconventional, up-tempo style, Kelly pushed the Ducks to run offense at breakneck speed, gassing defenses so badly that come the fourth quarter, linemen could barely get in a stance.
“I remember the very first time I did my run-pass option,” Dixon said, smiling. “I remember pulling it, running down the sideline,” he said. “The defense was totally faked out. It was mind-boggling … I knew then, this is going to work. Once we got the hang of it the question was, how fast can we do this?”
Nearly two decades after launching Oregon into a different stratosphere of college football, the former Ducks quarterback still wears his No. 10 Oregon hoodie. He knows other Oregon quarterbacks — Justin Herbert, Bo Nixon — have donned the number since.
But Dixon, now 41 and a fitness instructor who just finished running a high-intensity interval workout class at Soho House Portland, takes pride in the fact that in this current era, he wore that jersey first.
Some of his students know his background, and what he did to, in his own words, “make Eugene the place to be.” College football junkies might even agree with his claim that Oregon’s 2007 squad — the one Dixon quarterbacked — would “absolutely” beat the 2010 roster, the first Duck team to play for the national championship.
Others have no idea the guy encouraging them to dig deeper, to push themselves farther, is one of the best players in the history of Oregon football.
It’s humbling, he said, for people to recognize him and high-five him … and for others to stare blankly when they hear about his accomplishments.
This weekend, Kelly, who was promoted to Oregon head coach in 2009 and took the Ducks to their first national championship appearance in 2010, makes his return to Autzen with Northwestern, where he’s now offensive coordinator. The Wildcats take on reeling Oregon at 12:30 p.m. Saturday. The Ducks are sputtering with a backup quarterback and an inexperienced offensive line. They just fired first-year offensive coordinator Drew Mehringer. They spent a reported $40 million to $50 million on this roster, and they’re already out of the title race.
Meanwhile, Northwestern (6-1, 3-1 Big Ten) is ranked No. 20 and has won four straight behind Kelly’s modernized Wing-T offense. Kelly has coached against Oregon a handful of times since leaving Eugene in 2013, but is seeking his first win in Autzen since running UO’s program from 2009 to 2012.
Dixon will watch on TV from his home in Portland.
“It’s definitely strange,” Dixon said. “What a weird coincidence — Chip Kelly is coming to town, and we don’t have an offensive coordinator. Would he come back? I don’t know. What he did here before was special, but for now, we’ve got to go root against him.”
Your favorite team’s favorite team
For longtime Duck fans, Oregon’s most famous quarterback will likely always be Joey Harrington, a homegrown kid who had a Heisman billboard outside Madison Square Garden in 2001. But nearly two decades ago, it was a combo of Dixon and Kelly’s offense, plus a dizzying number of uniform combos, that made the UO the coolest program in the country. As local rap group Supwitchugirl aptly said, the Ducks were “your favorite teams’ favorite team.”
With Dixon, a Bay Area native, orchestrating what would become known as the Blur Offense, Oregon morphed into a perennial powerhouse.
“In 2007, we really lit the world on fire,” said former Oregon coach Mike Bellotti, who hired Kelly as offensive coordinator in February 2007.
Though the Ducks (4-3, 2-2) are struggling this year, Oregon came into this season — like many of the past 19 — with national title expectations. That’s at least partially due to Dixon, who raised the standard in Eugene, though Bellotti believes Dixon is now overlooked, and sometimes straight-up forgotten.
“Lots of sports fans, their time limit, their perspective, is about four to five years,” said Bellotti, who coached in Eugene from 1989 to 2008.
Then-No. 5 Oregon’s 24-17 win over then-No. 9 USC on Oct. 27, 2007, marked a shifting of the guard in the Pac-10 and threw the Ducks into the thick of the BCS race. By the end of that game Dixon, a 6-foot-5, 205-pounder who’d quickly become adept at faking handoffs before flying up the sideline for big gains — “his hands are huge, that really did help us run that offense so well,” Bellotti said — had become the Heisman frontrunner.
But a week later, when Oregon knocked off Arizona State, its second consecutive top-10 opponent, Dixon left the game after tweaking his left knee early in the fourth quarter. Though team trainers initially thought he’d be fine, imaging the next week revealed a partially torn anterior cruciate ligament. Dixon conferred with his father, doctors and coaches. Tons of athletes played on torn ACLs, doctors assured him. Heck, John Elway won two Super Bowls without the ligament.
“No one is thinking about their future then,” Dixon said. “I’m thinking about the right now — I’m thinking about how we’re putting Eugene on the map, how everybody knows us, that we are No. 2 in the nation and we can win the national championship. I’m thinking about how I want to be the first Heisman (winner) at the University of Oregon. I’m putting all my chips in. Let’s roll.”
Dixon decided to play in Oregon’s next game, at Arizona.
“That first series, I felt amazing,” he recalled. “I feel good, I feel normal, I’m running straight, I’m confident. But then we get into the red zone, we did a zone read, I had to pull it and I try to cut, and it totally gave out. I knew right then, my knee is done.”
‘I was so close’
The Ducks, who’d risen as high as No. 2 in the BCS, ended up losing three straight without Dixon as their offense, and their national championship hopes, cratered. Bellotti called it “the most costly injury anyone suffered in my time at Oregon.”
“We were an anomaly, and something you couldn’t prepare for in one week,” Bellotti said. “He was the best quarterback we could have imagined for that offense. Yes, I think he would have won the Heisman.”
Instead Dixon became the poster boy for rehab, working with trainers three times a day to get back as soon as possible. Despite a full tear of his ACL in mid-November, he returned for an individual pro day on April 3. It was a remarkable recovery for an injury that sidelines some people for a year.
Drafted in the fifth round by the Pittsburgh Steelers, Dixon hung around the NFL for seven years, mostly as a backup, winning Super Bowl rings with the Steelers (2009) and Baltimore Ravens (2013). He retired in October 2014.
Two months later, Marcus Mariota won the Heisman, the first — and still only — player in Oregon history to do so.
There was, Dixon admits, a twinge of envy watching Mariota accept the award.
“Early on, I was definitely jealous,” he said. “I was so close. And I know, if I hadn’t gotten hurt, I would have been the first to do it. But you can’t control injuries. And things really do happen for a reason. I got two Super Bowl rings, and an experience (in college and the NFL) that I never thought I’d be able to have.”
Dixon said he does not hold ill will toward anyone regarding what happened to his knee. If he had to do it all over again, he’d “preserve myself.” But hindsight, he sighed, is 20/20.
Football was a happy accident anyway. He’d initially planned to play pro baseball; Kelly famously lured him back to Eugene for his senior year, though Dixon had already started playing in the Atlanta Braves farm system.
After his NFL career wrapped Dixon started work at Nike. He spent three years at Jordan Brand, helping bring the Jumpman logo to college football. (Yes, Dixon said, Michael Jordan himself knew Dixon’s name the first time they met and no, Dixon was not speechless when he shook hands with His Airness. The only time Dixon’s actually been starstruck, ironically enough, was upon meeting Phil Knight, Oregon’s most generous benefactor.)
But soon, Dixon missed being around athletes. He left Nike in 2018 to “bet on himself” and start a performance training business. Leave No Doubt (formerly Dixon Fit) describes itself as a brand “with a mission to eliminate all excuses while challenging and empowering the next generation on and off the field.”
He trains individuals and groups of all levels, from regular Joes looking to get in better shape to aspiring pro athletes. He works at Soho, a private membership club, is an ambassador and online instructor for 24 Hour Fitness and does contract work with Nike.
Lately he’s been working a lot with flag football and lacrosse, two booming sports scheduled to appear in the 2028 Olympics. He’s gotten hooked on volleyball too, mostly because his wife, Sabrina, whom he married in August, is the volleyball coach at Mountainside High School in Beaverton. He loves mentoring athletes of all skill levels and all sports.
But first, and always, he’s an Oregon quarterback.
