There are many legacies from the Oregon football team: Kenny Wheaton’s “Pick,” the Chip Kelly era, flashy Nike uniforms, Marcus Mariota and the list just goes on.
Yet, there’s one legacy the program can’t seem to get to rid of.
Oregon has a problem with penalties. For the past eight years, the team has continuously been ranked among teams with the most penalties.
But the first seven games of the 2018 season have shown a Duck team that is on its way to breaking the trend.
With the help of adding officials to practices, Oregon is ranked on top of the conference with the second-least amount of total penalties for the first time in the past decade.
“It’s been all about discipline, and discipline starts with everything you do in your daily life,” Oregon head coach Mario Cristobal said. “That’s been a huge point of emphasis of the culture. We thought that if we could get that done, that would coincide with the elimination of a lot of the penalties and would result in better play and more disciplined play.”
When Cristobal officially took over the role as head coach in January, decreasing the team’s penalties was one of his top priorities.
During training camp and every practice since, Cristobal has brought in officials to monitor. Having a set of a referees’ eyes watching during practices allows the Ducks to clean up their plays by learning to avoid making penalties.
“We have officials out here every single day in practice. That’s been the biggest difference, and they whip those flags right at you,” Cristobal said. “They’re pretty wicked guys, but they help us out a lot.”
Oregon’s three penalties during its season opener against Bowling Green is not only its lowest penalty count of the season thus far, but it’s the program’s fourth time recording only three penalties since 2011.
“Coach Cristobal always emphasizes penalties as a lack of culture; if you don’t get on your guys hard enough, you don’t teach them the right things, like the fundamentals,” Senior inside linebacker Kaulana Apelu said. “I just give credit to them [coaches] for always getting on us to fix that because penalties is a big problem.”
It’s a huge improvement for a team that was ranked as the most-penalized team in the Pac-12 and in the NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (with 122 total penalties last season) and has seen two seasons in a row with a 14-penalty count game.
Since the 2008 season, the Ducks have only finished better than eighth in the conference twice: once in 2011 (ranked No. 7 with an average of 7.21 penalties per game) and once in 2009 (ranked No. 7 in the then-Pac-10 with 7.3 penalties per game).
Over halfway into the regular scheduled season, Washington leads the Pac-12 with the fewest amount of total penalties (37). Oregon is ranked second with 38 — which is 23 fewer than the team’s total at this point in the season last year.
“There is a lot of progress in so many areas, but we are nowhere near where we want to be yet,” Cristobal said. “There is no magic formula to this. There is no hocus-pocus. We’re not based or founded on any trickery or false enthusiasm or energy. We grind at it to build it the right way because it’s the only way to build it to last.”
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