Born: Daniel James Weaver
on June 23, 1980 in Redmond, Ore.
High School:
All-Intermountain Conference center and pitcher for Redmond High School. Led baseball and basketball squads to league titles his senior season. In football, played center, linebacker and long snapper, earning first-team conference honors on offense and second-team honors on defense.
Oregon: Took a year and a half off to bulk up before walking on to Oregon squad in spring 2000. Worked his way into short-snapper’s role, also snapping some balls for the offense. Started the first two games of the 2001 season, came off the bench in third game and has notched 16-straight starts since then.
You’d be daunted by this task, wouldn’t you? Surely.
You only weigh 225 pounds, which shouldn’t seem like an “only” for a normal person but is actually quite small for an offensive lineman. So you know you have to put on at least 50 pounds to even have a chance at walking on to the Pacific-10 Conference power you’ve idolized since you could walk on the ground.
In order to put on that much weight, you’ll have to spend a year and a half away from football, the sport you love. That time will be spent in the weight room and working a job to make ends meet.
Then, after all that, you might not make the team. You certainly can’t count on a scholarship. If you do make the team, you probably won’t even play until your senior year.
Daunting? Not for Dan Weaver. Why? Well, let’s just say if there was a movie entitled “Rudy II: My Brother Rudy,” Dan Weaver would be the hero.
Jed Weaver, a former Oregon tight end and Dan Weaver’s older brother, walked on to the team in 1994 and blazed a path for his younger sibling to do the same. But Dan Weaver rose rapidly — much more rapidly than his brother — through the ranks to become the Ducks’ starting center and the anchor of a spectacularly underrated offensive line.
“It’s easy to go after something when you know it can be accomplished,” Weaver said. “That’s how I started contact with (Oregon), was through my brother.”
Like Jed Weaver, Dan Weaver has a staggering work ethic akin to something from the silver screen, and that work ethic has led to him to where he is now.
But it didn’t come easily. Weaver, a three-sport star at Redmond High School in central Oregon, was an all-league center but couldn’t get a scholarship offer, even from the Ducks. So he spent the next year and a half working at a casting plant in his home town and volunteering to coach the freshman football team at his alma mater.
“He was small in high school; he did all his growing after he got here,” backup center Robin Knebel said. “If he was the same size as everybody else, he would’ve been a scholarship guy just like everyone else.”
So Weaver hit the weights, put on 55 pounds of muscle and came to Oregon in the winter of 2000 with a mission: make the team.
That he did, impressing the coaches enough with his improvements over spring drills to ensure himself a spot on the team as the short snapper in the fall.
“I doubted myself coming in,” Weaver said. “But after those first spring drills and being able to watch myself on tape improving, being able to block guys that are supposed to be all-world, that’s when you get the feeling that you could do it if you just work hard.”
Weaver’s progression didn’t stop there. He started taking all the short snaps (mostly field goals) for the Ducks and worked his way onto the offensive line. By the end of the year, it was clear that Weaver would be much more than “that walk-on” by the time 2001 rolled around.
“Dan just worked his way in, and seems to be here by his effort, by his work ethic,” fellow offensive lineman Joey Forster said. “He really helps us, too, because he’s a really smart guy. He uses that to his advantage; he outsmarts his opponent.”
Weaver’s intelligence is well recognized — he was a Pac-10 first-team all-academic honoree last season and was named to the Verizon academic all-district second team — and he uses that intelligence to turn the center spot into a thinking-man’s position. He’s a “technician,” according to Knebel, and breaks down an opponent like he might break down a problem in an accounting class.
Weaver is the only accounting major on the football team other than Matt Floberg, and if it’s hard to imagine sitting next to a 280-pound man in an accounting class, imagine what a 280-pound pitcher looks like.
The junior played three sports in high school, with baseball and, yes, pitching as his strongest suit. Weaver said that if he hadn’t been able to walk on to the Oregon football team, he might have explored other, more baseball-related options.
“Baseball is a much calmer, laid back sport and that’s not my personality,” Weaver said. “I think I would play (baseball if I wasn’t playing football); I’d go pitch.”
So the Ems could have had a center-sized guy pitching long relief. Of course, Weaver wasn’t completely center-sized when he graduated from high school, especially not as far as the Ducks were concerned.
Little did he and the team know that a few short years later, he would be the center point of the entire offense.
“Dan has been the leader of (the offensive line) and has carried it out extremely well,” Oregon head coach Mike Bellotti said. “And we look to him for leadership, not just on the offensive line but on the entire team.”
That’s an awe-insiring comment, coming about a guy who faced such a daunting task so short a time ago.
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