Mark Helfrich entered Arizona Stadium’s press room after the Saturday’s game with a demeanor one would expect from a coach whose team just lost by 26 points in a game it was expected to win. A slumped posture. A solemn voice. Eyes expressing a mixture of pain and sadness. He looked like someone who just committed a colossal mistake, and his words reflected that.
“How we started, very sluggish in every phase, that’s 100 percent my fault,” Helfrich said after the game.
Oregon’s head coach uttered similar phrases later in the press conference following the 42-16 loss to Arizona. During his Sunday conference call with local media, Helfrich was asked why he seems to take full responsibility for losses while deflecting all of the praise toward his players after wins.
“I guess that’s just my belief,” he said. “Good things are because of what they (the players) do, and if things don’t go our way, we couldn’t help but have done something better. That’s kind of always been my deal.”
Helfrich said his team has responded well in the 24 hours since the loss to the Wildcats, saying his players were attentive in Sunday’s team meetings.
“We had some very good conversations,” Helfrich said. “We talked about accountability from starting with me to ending with me and everything in between. I had some conversations with some of the leaders and those guys did a nice job today.”
While the Ducks’ aspirations of playing in the Pac-12 Championship, the Rose Bowl or even the BCS title game have all been demolished, they still have one more regular season game left. Not only will it determine which bowl game the Ducks go to, it’s against Oregon’s in-state rival, Oregon State.
Helfrich remembers growing up in a town (Coos Bay) that was divided when it came to the Ducks-Beavers rivalry, but he was far from neutral when it came to Civil War allegiance.
“I was a Duck fan,” he said.
Helfrich said the OSU game this upcoming Friday at Autzen Stadium will involve an “element of redemption” because of the loss in Tucson, Ariz., on Saturday. He knows Oregon State is a big rival with a solid team this season that could upset the Ducks if they don’t prepare well.
But after the humiliating loss to Arizona, Helfrich said the opponent’s location, record and talent level mean essentially nothing this week. He knows the Wildcats simply outplayed his team, and he wants to make sure he doesn’t have that demoralizing post-game feeling on Friday.
“I think missing in a lot of this is Arizona played really well,” Helfrich said. “They beat us yesterday. There’s a lot of stuff that we contributed to that that we would like to control a lot differently. From that standpoint, it doesn’t matter who we’re playing.”
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