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Yesterday, Fiji wasn’t particularly interested in one of our really long walks. She wanted to be outside, wanted to wander around a little bit, find a comfortable place in the sun and simply enjoy a summer day. So that’s mostly what we did.
Sitting there with her, it occurred to me that this is probably the last weekend for a while that I’ll have quite this kind of freedom myself. Football is back. Media day has come and gone, fall camp is underway, and soon enough there will be games, travel, stories to write, film to go back through and all the weekly rhythms that come with another Oregon football season. So maybe Fiji had the right idea. Sit in the sun for a little while and think.
As I did, I found myself going back through everything I heard at media day, everything we’ve heard through this first week of practices and, really, some of the things Oregon players and coaches have been talking about throughout the summer. One idea kept coming back to me: fellowship, connection and cohesion. Not simply whether Oregon has enough talent, because we already know it does, or whether the Ducks have enough experience, because they certainly have more of it than they did a year ago. What I kept thinking about was whether all of those individual pieces can become something larger than themselves.
There is an old thought from Marcus Aurelius that kept coming to mind as I considered it: “We are made for cooperation, like feet, like hands, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth.”
The larger idea is that cooperation is part of our nature. Hands aren’t particularly useful because each finger performs its own job brilliantly while ignoring the other four. Teeth don’t accomplish much by operating independently. The parts have individual responsibilities, but their real value emerges from the way they function together.
Football isn’t much different, and perhaps that’s why one of the most important things Oregon has been building this offseason hasn’t always looked like football.
At media day, Dan Lanning talked about the coaching staff’s annual retreat in Central Oregon. There was naturally plenty of football during the first part of the day, followed by what Lanning called fellowship in the second half. Whitewater rafting, time together and opportunities for people who spend extraordinary amounts of time working beside one another to interact without every conversation being attached to the next practice plan, recruiting decision or game plan.
When I asked Lanning how important that fellowship becomes later, when a season introduces pressure, stress, intensity and emotion, his answer made clear that this wasn’t simply an offseason diversion.
“Connection, fellowship, like that’s a huge piece for us,” Lanning said. “And that doesn’t happen just in the summer. That doesn’t just happen in spring or even just in fall camp. That’s something we want to carry over. So, we have to challenge ourselves to create those moments.”
I’ve thought quite a bit about those last few words since media day: create those moments. Connection doesn’t automatically happen when more than 100 football players put on the same uniform, and neither does teamwork. We sometimes talk about teamwork as though it is simply the combined result of everybody executing an individual assignment correctly. A left tackle blocks his man, a receiver runs his route, a quarterback makes his read, a defensive lineman controls his gap and a linebacker makes the tackle. Do your job and, theoretically, everything takes care of itself.
Except football doesn’t really work that way. An offensive lineman’s block changes what becomes possible for the running back. A receiver’s route can create space for another receiver who ultimately gets the football. One defensive lineman’s rush affects the lane available to the player beside him, while a safety’s decision depends upon what is happening several yards in front of him. Every individual responsibility exists inside somebody else’s responsibility, and that’s where cohesion becomes something more than everybody simply doing his own job well.
Oregon’s players spent much of media day talking about exactly that.
Elijah Rushing may have explained it best when we were talking about the players’ leadership retreat in Bend and what happens when teammates who might not ordinarily spend significant time together suddenly share a weekend. Rushing talked about being around players he might not normally talk to, learning who they are, hearing their stories and seeing them in a different light. He then connected those moments directly to what happens when football becomes difficult.
Fall camp is a battle. Offense is competing against defense, players are competing with the person beside them for opportunities, everybody is tired and everybody is being pushed. For a few hours, it can easily feel as though there are competing sides. But, as Rushing put it, “At the end of the day, we’re on the same team.”
Then came what may have been one of the most important things I heard all afternoon.
“We’re looking to be the best team, and we’re looking to use our connection to go towards our goal rather than just individual efforts.”
There it is. Not the best collection of players. The best team.
There is considerable research supporting that distinction. Studies of team cohesion have consistently found a relationship between cohesion and performance, but an especially important distinction is the difference between simply liking the people around you and developing what researchers call task cohesion. Friendship is valuable, but being connected around a shared purpose is considerably more powerful. The social part still matters because those relationships can create the trust that eventually allows task cohesion to develop.
Dante Moore gave us a wonderfully simple example at media day when he talked about spending time in the ocean with Oregon’s receivers during the offseason. There were waves and apparently some convincing required to get everybody into the water, but Moore laughed as he explained that they eventually trusted him enough to go in.
“Our trust level is way up there,” Moore said.
It sounds like a funny summer story until you listen to where Moore went next. He started talking about everyone coming together, keeping the same goal in mind and attacking it. That’s where the line between fellowship and football starts disappearing. The moment itself doesn’t make Moore throw a better pass or a receiver run a cleaner route, but the trust built in those moments carries into the work they do together.
The defensive line provided another example. Teitum Tuioti talked this week about the chemistry that group has been developing, part of which happened during a trip to the beach. There was fellowship, but there was also football conversation. What happens when one player rushes this way? How does the player beside him respond? What does one person’s movement create for another? They weren’t merely learning about one another. They were learning how to work with one another.
“This year is really going to be us playing together as one unit,” Tuioti said.
Those words matter because Oregon isn’t wondering whether its defensive front has talented football players. Matayo Uiagalelei, Tuioti, Bear Alexander, A’Mauri Washington, Elijah Rushing, Nasir Wyatt, Aydin Breland and others give the Ducks an extraordinary collection of individual possibilities. But a collection of talented defensive linemen isn’t necessarily a defensive front. They become one when what each player does starts complementing what everyone else is doing.
The same is true across the roster, and this is where I think the fellowship we’ve heard so much about this summer may ultimately become important. Not necessarily against Montana State when Oregon is heavily favored, and not when everything is going exactly according to plan. The value of those relationships is more likely to show itself when things aren’t going particularly well.
There will be a Saturday when Oregon falls behind. There will be a game when the offense isn’t moving the football and the defense keeps returning to the field. Somebody will make a mistake. A player expecting 30 snaps may get 10. Someone younger may move ahead of someone older. A coach will make a decision a player doesn’t particularly like. By November, everybody will be tired, everybody will hurt somewhere and everybody will have spent months living under increasingly intense expectations.
Those are the moments when simply saying, “We’re all Ducks,” isn’t enough. Trust has to have been built before it is needed.
Rushing talked about Oregon’s “Get Real” meetings, where players sit down together and talk honestly about what is happening inside football and outside of it. How are you feeling? What are we seeing? How do we reframe it? Most importantly, are we still aligned with what we said we wanted to accomplish?
That’s culture operating as something more than a slogan, and it’s why I keep coming back to fellowship.
The purpose isn’t to make every Oregon football player best friends with every other Oregon football player. That’s neither necessary nor particularly realistic. The point is to know one another well enough that competition doesn’t become division, to build enough trust that someone can tell a teammate the truth and to understand the person across the locker room well enough that when adversity arrives, nobody simply retreats into his own individual world.
This particular Oregon team may have something unusual developing in that regard. One veteran described it at media day as the most time he’s spent hanging out with teammates away from football without coaches having to tell them to do it. Offense and defense, players spending time together because they want to, not because it is somewhere on the schedule. He called them brothers.
None of that guarantees Oregon anything this fall. Neither does returning experience, a deep defensive line, a veteran quarterback or another collection of blue-chip recruits. There are no championships awarded for winning the offseason fellowship contest. But championships are extraordinarily difficult to win without the ability to function collectively when the pressure is greatest.
That’s what makes all of those summer stories potentially meaningful. Maybe the whitewater rafting mattered. Maybe the weekend in Bend mattered. Maybe the trip to the beach mattered. Maybe Dante getting his receivers into the ocean mattered. Not because any of those things make someone block better, tackle harder or throw a more accurate football, but because the person you know is easier to trust than the person you merely work beside. And the person you trust is easier to follow, challenge, support and sacrifice for.
Marcus Aurelius was writing almost two thousand years before anyone had ever drawn up a football play, but perhaps he understood something that remains applicable to what Oregon is trying to build. We are made for cooperation, like feet, like hands, like those rows of upper and lower teeth. Each part has its responsibility, but none of them accomplish much alone.
Sitting outside with Fiji yesterday, with her perfectly content to stretch out in the summer sun and nowhere particularly important for either one of us to be, that was the thought I kept returning to. Oregon has spent an offseason building individual football players, but what may ultimately determine where this season goes is whether all of that individual growth has also built a team.
The Ducks certainly believe it has.
Now comes the part where we get to see it.