I have been thinking about the concept of “Under Construction” that Oregon’s staff used as a metaphor for last season.
The phrase worked on multiple levels. The Ducks were building a team around young talent, developing a new generation of leaders and trying to move another step closer to the destination Dan Lanning has never attempted to conceal. At the same time, the program’s new practice facility had begun its actual construction, creating a physical representation of everything Oregon was attempting to become.
Steel, concrete, machinery and unfinished spaces surrounded a football team that was also incomplete.
A year later, I came across a quote attributed to architect Frank Lloyd Wright:
“I know the price of success: dedication, hard work, and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen.”
It stayed with me because it seemed to connect Oregon’s metaphor from last season with the method the Ducks have embraced this season.
The Harada Method has been discussed repeatedly throughout media day and the opening practices of fall camp. Its structure places the largest goal at the center, then surrounds it with the smaller objectives and daily actions necessary to make that goal attainable.
The method itself is not success. It is a pathway toward it.
Under Construction described what Oregon was.
The Harada Method is an attempt to define how Oregon becomes what it wants to be.
The connection between them may be best understood through Wright’s three-part description of the price: dedication, hard work and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen.
There is also something in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, “The Ladder of St. Augustine,” that belongs in this conversation:
All common things, each day’s events,
That with the hour begin and end;
Our pleasures and our discontents,
Are rounds by which we may ascend.
The ladder is not climbed through a single extraordinary leap. Its rungs are built from common things and ordinary days, including the frustrations, repetitions, setbacks and small decisions that rarely appear in the final story.
After listening to Oregon’s players and coaches throughout this week, that is what stood out to me.
The national championship is the visible height.
Nearly every interview was about a rung.
