A Walk to Autzen or to a Trail of Broken Dreams? The Importance of Oregon's Head Coaching Search

A deep dive into why the timing of Mario Cristobal's departure could be critically damaging to the Oregon football program.

Close, but no cigar. A phrase that sounds like an answer to a Jeopardy! question asking for a saying to describe the Oregon football program.

If Oregon had a national championship window while Mario Cristobal was still in town, it may have just zipped shut with him taking the job at Miami.

Every year, few programs in college football have higher expectations coming into a season than the Oregon Ducks, especially in the last decade and a half or so. Sure, the Ducks have reached highs during the last 20 years that many programs across the country would salivate at the slightest daydream of.

But the Oregon Ducks need a national championship to make up for the decades of being so close, but no cigar. They need that cigar, and their shot at getting one soon went on the plane to Miami with Cristobal. 

Oregon was brutally close multiple times to being a national championship-caliber program while Cristobal was at the helm. I need not mention the Arizona State game in the 2019 season or the Utah games in 2021, but it seems like the Ducks are due for a game like that every year where their postseason hopes and dreams are ultimately crushed after being right in front of them.

It must be said that it's incredibly difficult to win in college football, especially in a conference like the Pac-12 that doesn't care what your postseason goals are. Obviously, teams like Alabama, Clemson and Ohio State have made winning conference games and getting to the College Football Playoff look easy for many years, and Oregon appeared to be in prime position to be on that same tier as those programs.

The mentality being instilled in the team by Cristobal and his staff was definitely that of a team destined for the playoff, and the talent being brought on was as well. Cristobal changed the blueprint for how Oregon attacked its goal of winning a national championship. 

Oregon was recruiting at a level that it had never seen before, pulling in recruits from areas that were rather unexplored by a West Coast program, like Texas, Alabama, and Florida, and the coaching staff was stacked with experience and elite recruiting ability. 

But yet on the field, the Ducks were nothing more than a Pac-12 championship favorite and a team that was a game or two away from the College Football Playoff. 

The ceiling for the program for the better part of the last decade and since Cristobal turned the program around seems to be a Pac-12 title and a Rose Bowl Game victory, which, again, is still nothing to complain about. Winning your conference and defeating a Big Ten elite in the "Granddaddy Of 'Em All" still counts as a successful year, but shouldn't a program with this coaching staff, this amount of talent, as well as financial resources, achieve much more than that?

It looked like the Ducks were finally going to do just that in September when they knocked off Ohio State in Columbus despite missing some big-name starters. The Ducks have had plenty of elite teams with some big-time wins in the past 10-20 years, but getting a win over a blue-blood in their own stadium tripled, if not quadrupled, the team's expectations for the season.

Prior to the season, many saw this year as the start of a stint of dominance for Oregon given the amount of young talent that was on the roster and coming into Eugene in the future. But earning a win against a team like Ohio State early in the year pushed the needle on the trajectory of the program and kicked the College Football Playoff talks into high gear.

This was the year to break the spell, it seemed. This team had what it took to compete with the upper echelon of college football and bring glory to Eugene. Of course, the Ducks were burdened by an avalanche of injuries to starters on both sides of the ball, but even still, the Ducks found ways to win games and it looked like a CFP berth was within reach.

Then the Ducks lost to Stanford, and after a winning streak put Oregon back in the running for the CFP, the Utah massacres happened. Now the Ducks aren't in the CFP or even a New Year's Six bowl, the bulk of the coaching staff is on its way out, along with a chunk of their 2022 recruiting class that was bound to top the conference for a third straight cycle.

With the way that this coaching carousel in college football has gone, this had to be the year for Oregon to put it together. Now, out of nowhere Lincoln Riley is primed to bring the USC football program back from the dead, the SEC is juiced with elite coaches like Nick Saban, Brian Kelly, Lane Kiffin and Jimbo Fisher with Oklahoma and Texas on their way to the already-stacked conference, and there's still Ohio State, Clemson, Notre Dame, Michigan, Cincinnati, and other programs that are on the rise in the sport.

There's no telling if Oregon getting closer to, or even making it into the College Football Playoff would have prevented Cristobal from going to Miami or from most of his assistants leaving the program, but it could appear that an Oregon program that was bound to reach new heights in 2022 and beyond is on its way to a regression with this rebuild of the coaching staff. Unless the Ducks nail the hire.

Cristobal is not going to be easy to replace, and neither are any of his assistants. The momentum they created on the recruiting trail struck fear into every West Coast program and even into teams like Alabama and Ohio State with a resounding message: Oregon can recruit and land elite talent over the big boys of the sport despite being located in a small city in Western Oregon.

That momentum simply cannot be passed on like a baton in a relay, especially while we wait to see what the staff looks like in the coming weeks. Sure, it's possible that an internal hire wouldn't have slowed it down as much, but there are merely scraps of this coaching staff still employed at Oregon. The chances of an internal hire being made are slim.

This is the most important coaching staff in the history of the program. USC knocked its search out of the park and has the chance to shake the power structure of the Pac-12, one that Oregon once stood alone atop. Elite recruits are coming back to Southern California to join an elite coach who will undoubtedly dig the Trojans out from their burial site.

Washington made a great hire in Kalen DeBoer and won't be one of the doormats in the Pac-12 North for much longer. Oregon State appears to be flipping the script with Jonathan Smith at the helm, and plenty of other programs in the conference are on their way too.

Oregon can't settle for a coach that will simply maintain the success that it's had for 20 years. Rob Mullens and the university must make a monumental hire that will bring a national championship to Eugene, once and for all. If they don't, it will be another trail of seasons with fans and the college football world asking "what could have been?"

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