| Rich Brooks in the UO Hall of Fame? |
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| Written by Jerry Thompson | |||||||||||||
| Thursday, 01 November 2007 | |||||||||||||
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Once a Beaver, Brooks is now immortalized as a Duck. It was 45 years ago that Rich Brooks, playing for the Beavers, shanked a punt that took a tricky bounce and hit the Ducks’ Mel Renfro in the knee. OSU recovered the ball and the Terry Baker-led Beavers completed a come from behind win over the Ducks. The loss knocked them out of the Bluebonnet Bowl in Texas. I witnessed that painful loss which was one of many painful defeats against the Beavers as the Ducks won only one time in the next 10 years. OSU won eight straight from 1964-1971 and Rich Brooks was an assistant at Oregon State for many of those Duck losses.
What’s this got to do with Brooks being elected into the UO Hall of Fame? It merely gives people perspective, especially for those who seem to think UO history began in about 1987. As a teenager witnessing the Ducks losing to the Beavers year after year, the idea of Rich Brooks, who then despised the Ducks, someday being elected into the UO Hall of Fame, would have been unthinkable.
When Rich accepted the job at Oregon, his wife, Karen, who was an Oregon State cheerleader, vowed that she would never wear green and yellow. She eventually changed and Brooks, of course, is not the first, nor last college football coach to jump ship so to speak and come on board as skipper of his former archrival. He is the only head coach, to my knowledge, to do so in the long UO-OSU sports history. As Brooks stated in “Mighty Oregon” the UO football video history, “Coaching football is my business and I was given an opportunity at the University of Oregon that I wasn’t given at Oregon State.” Many times in public Brooks would refer to Oregon State as “those guys." Brooks is already in the Oregon State Hall of Fame as one of the coaches of the 1967 “Giant Killers” team and he is in the UO Hall of Fame as head coach of the 1994 team that went to the Rose Bowl. In Brooks’ 18 years as Oregon’s head coach, he had 10 losing seasons and 8 winning seasons. Of those 8 winning seasons, the 1989 and 1990 teams and the 1994 team were the only ones that won more than 6 games. An objective look shows that 14 out of his 18 seasons produced mediocre teams at the best. The record of his last four seasons at Oregon was 23 wins and 24 losses.
Rich Brooks did a lot of things the right way for the UO football program. He emphasized academics and cared for his players. For the most part, especially with his earlier teams, I admired the toughness and hustle and willingness to do anything to win that his teams displayed. Players would say they would “go to war” with Brooks.
After his most successful campaign in 1994, instead of trying to build a perennial winner at Oregon he wasted no time accepting an NFL head coaching position with St. Louis. To his credit he did not leave the cupboards bare, and his recommendation of Mike Bellotti has proven that his judgment has been sound.
It seems to be the consensus opinion that the program was a disaster before Brooks took the helm. Brooks replaced Don Read whose teams improved from 2 wins to 3 wins to 4 wins in his three years. In fact, if it had not been for a 3rd and 34-yard conversion by WSU late in the game at Autzen in 1976, Rich Brooks nor any other coach (Norm Van Brocklin was willing to coach the Ducks for no salary) would have been sought to replace Don Read. The Cougars won the game at the last minute, and instead of a 5-6 season with the promise of more improvement, the Ducks finished 4-7. The UO was extremely patient with Brooks. In his first 6 years, four of his teams had two-win seasons.
Brooks has always been able to come through with his back to the wall. Who could have imagined after losses to Hawaii and Utah, where Autzen was half full and “Ditch Rich” signs and t-shirt were displayed throughout Autzen, that shortly after the season was over Brooks would receive the Paul “Bear” Bryant award as the nation's top coach? Now at Kentucky, it looked like Brooks was going to be fired and he even confided that he didn’t think Kentucky would retain him. Despite a recent upset loss to Mississippi State, Brooks has Kentucky on the winning track.
I think Rich Brooks deserves to be in the UO Hall of Fame. His teams with Chris Miller and Bill Musgrave produced some big wins and gave hope to fans that Oregon could compete in the Pac-10. Certainly the Rose Bowl year and winning the National Coach of the Year award were amazing accomplishments. It was just a long and strange road for someone that began as a Beaver.
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