Oregon Football More Closed Off To The Public

September 30, 2011 / Football

EUGENE — There are walls going up around the Oregon football program this season where there used to be windows, and Ducks athletic director Rob Mullens isn’t apologizing for it.

“Are we trying to find more efficient ways to run our operation this season?” Mullens asks rhetorically. “That may be true.”

In this case, “efficient” translates in the following ways:

Practices are closed, not just to the media, but to practice regulars such as Cottage Grove Youth for Christ, a handful of retirees filling up their mornings by hanging on the sidelines, and several jobless fans, who can’t afford game tickets.

Oregon coach Chip Kelly no longer does his radio show live on Tuesday nights from The Cooler, a bar just a stone’s throw from Oregon’s Casanova Center athletic complex. Instead, Kelly tapes a segment on Sunday that is shown Tuesday at the Cooler.

Kelly was a regular on the Bald Faced Truth radio program hosted by The Oregonian columnist John Canzano last year. No more.

An Oregon tradition in which boosters gathered for a postgame reception with members of the coaching staff in the Pittman Room at the Casanova Center has been rerouted to the Club at Autzen Stadium on the south side of the stadium. Coaches no longer attend.

Policing practices, of course, can be difficult in an era in which everybody’s cell phone has photo and video capability. Oregon isn’t the only program to shut out the public.

But that doesn’t explain why Kelly and his assistants have so completely closed themselves off to the public after practices and games.

Last week, Kelly referred a question about his Tuesday night absence from The Cooler to Mullens.

The UO athletic director says: “There are more efficient ways to have a radio show than on Tuesday nights during a game week, a preparation week. That’s tough.”

The show at the Cooler now includes the in-house radio play-by-play team of Jerry Allen and Mike Jorgensen, Oregon on-air personality Jill Savage and player guests.

Mullens says the Ducks moved the postgame booster reception to Autzen because construction of Oregon’s new football operations center has made parts of the Casanova Center unusable and forced changes in the way the building is used.

Mullens says coaches no longer have time to mingle with boosters at the postgame reception because of changes in the way on-campus recruiting visits are scheduled.

Neither explanation is convincing. It’s difficult to believe Kelly couldn’t structure his week in such a way to make possible a three-minute drive for dinner at The Cooler on Tuesday nights, or configure recruiting weekends so the coaching staff had 45 minutes with the boosters after a game.

The new policies might reflect Kelly’s distaste for glad-handing.

Kelly, one person close to the situation said, is happier in his office, shades drawn, watching video.

Unlike predecessors Rich Brooks and Mike Bellotti, Kelly never has been a regular at the Oregon Club of Portland’s weekly booster luncheons. This partly can be explained away because Oregon now practices in the morning during the season. Kelly would have to leave early to make lunch.

But Brooks and Bellotti sometimes arrived late to their afternoon practices after the 100-mile return trip from Portland. Their assistants ran practice in the head coach’s absence.

Kelly does address the Portland luncheons via a new video-conferencing system, which Mullens says works well, and has been attending Monday luncheons of the Oregon Club of Eugene-Springfield.

One Eugene booster grouses, though, he learned nothing there he hadn’t already heard on television or read in news accounts. Kelly, this booster says, breezes into lunch late, is gone at the end, and never stops to socialize.

If Brooks and Bellotti were willing to the work the room, Kelly is not.

That might be the price of success.

It’s hard to second-guess the product Kelly puts on the field. Oregon is 25-5 since he became coach. The Ducks have played back-to-back in the Rose Bowl and BCS National Championship Game, and are ranked No. 9 nationally this week. No other Oregon coach has done so much so fast.

As long as the Ducks continue to win, or unless the NCAA drops a big hammer on them at the end of the ongoing investigation into Oregon’s recruiting, nothing is likely to change.

The higher the program climbs, the harder it will be to reach out and touch. That’s life. No UO fan would trade victories for access.

This isn’t a mom-and-pop operation anymore.

In some ways, that is a little sad.


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