Taggart Spends First Day On The Job
12/08/16 | Football, @GoDucksMoseley
New UO football coach Willie Taggart met Oregon's returning players, toured the Ducks' facilities and participated in a press conference Thursday.
EUGENE, Ore. – New UO football coach Willie Taggart began his morning Thursday by touring Oregon's one-of-a-kind facilities.
The tour took him through the Hatfield-Dowlin Complex, with its mammoth weight room, players' lounge and high-tech offices. It took him also to the new Marcus Mariota Sports Performance Center, with its cutting edge player development features and spacious new equipment room.
With each step of the tour, another man's pulse might have quickened, his blood pressure spiked. Every dazzling feature of the facilities might have added another pound of pressure to be borne across the shoulders of the new Oregon football head coach.
Taggart processed the tour in another manner. Oregon's facilities didn't impress upon him the weight of expectations. He viewed them as a platform upon which to build a great program.
"I don't feel any pressure," Taggart said a couple hours later, late Thursday morning in his first press conference since being hired as the Ducks' 33rd head football coach earlier in the week. "It's our job to win. … I've never had the opportunity to have the kind of resources we have here."
Taggart, who finalized a contract with Oregon late Tuesday after four seasons at South Florida, travelled to Eugene on Wednesday and was formally introduced as the Ducks' new coach late Thursday morning. He stood in front of a packed house in the Hatfield-Dowlin Complex's team theater and laid out his vision for the program – a team of student-athletes committed to academics as well as athletics, and playing for nothing less than national championships.
Taggart expressed his appreciation for the impact the legendary Harbaugh family has had on his career, and said he intends to surround himself at Oregon with people who have a similar level of what he termed "juice." He plans to speak with the previous UO staff of assistants in the process of building his own new staff with the Ducks, and he spoke of wanting to "put a fence around" the state of Oregon in recruiting.
UO athletic director Rob Mullens introduced Taggart at Thursday's press event, after an exhaustive weeklong search process that also required him to balance his duties with the College Football Playoff selection committee.
"We sought someone who shared our values, someone who had a track record of success, someone who genuinely cared about our student-athletes, yet could push them to their potential," Mullens said. "And we found him."
Following the facilities tour and prior to his press conference, Taggart spent about 20 minutes in a meeting with Oregon's returning players. Some of them wore the Ducks' standard weight-room gear – gray T-shirt with a symbolic blue collar, shorts and sneakers – due to a workout prior to or after the meeting.
Among the guys in that category was quarterback Justin Herbert, who took over the Ducks' starting job as a true freshman during the recently completed 4-8 season.
"I'm excited," Herbert said following the meeting. "He seems like he knows what he's doing. He's very enthusiastic, and I think he's going to be a great leader."
The major theme of the meeting with players was accountability. Later in the press conference, Taggart repeated no less than four times that his players would "excel in the classroom and graduate on time." Among the relatively few questions he posed during the facilities tour was how players maintained their locker room – an orderly locker room being a sign of a disciplined, mature team.
"He's excited to work hard with us," offensive lineman Doug Brenner said. "He said there's a lot of stuff that needs to change to get us back where we need to be. But he's excited for that.
"He said we're going to take care of things – academically, on the field and off the field. No exceptions. And you're going to do what he wants, or you won't be around."
At the press conference, Taggart crystalized his expectations with a few slogans.
"Make no excuses. Blame no one. And do something."
"When wishing won't work, work will."
"Have a great day if you want to."
They all stress personal accountability and self-determination. Those qualities helped Taggart thrive as a quarterback at Western Kentucky, where he was recruited by the eventual best man at his wedding, Jim Harbaugh. They helped as well as Taggart rebuilt two losing programs in his first two head coaching jobs, at his alma mater and then South Florida.
At Oregon, Taggart won't be asked to rebuild so much as redirect a program that has been among college football's elite for most of the last decade. The Ducks began to drift off course in recent months, and Taggart needs to nudge them back in the right direction.
That process will require some patience, he said, but "we've got to have progress within that patience, to get where you want to go."
And where does Taggart want to take the Ducks? Nothing less than a national title, for which they played after both the 2010 and 2014 seasons. The opportunity to do so was what ultimately attracted him to the Oregon job.
"That was important to me," Taggart said. "And there's no reason for us not to."
Wishing won't get the Ducks to college football's promised land. Work will. And after Thursday's introductions, Taggart went to work on that process. But only after, over a few hours Thursday morning, laying out a vision to his players and then the media that reinvigorated the Oregon football program.
