Mark Helfrich's time at Oregon is ticking after embarrassing loss to Washington

Published Nov. 15, 2016 3:28 p.m. ET

Aaron Torres

I have no idea if Mark Helfrich will survive the year as head coach of Oregon, if he’ll see a game in 2017, or be let go at some point in between.

But what I do know is this: Following Saturday’s embarrassing 70-21 loss to Washington, it’s over for Helfrich. His time is ticking. It’s not a matter of “when” he gets let go, but “if.” This is a loss he will never recover from.

The final stat line shows just how wide the margin was between these teams. Yes, there were the 70 points Washington put up, but worse were the other stats. The 682 yards allowed. The 8.4 yards per rush. The 22 of 28 completions with six touchdowns that Jake Browning threw. None of the stats were in Oregon’s favor, and you know what the worst part was? Washington didn’t play its best. A normally crisp team had 12 penalties for 89 yards. The Huskies won by nearly 50, and could have played better.

It shows how far Oregon has fallen. Never forget that it was a few years ago, in the height of the Chip Kelly era, where the Ducks were the single most explosive team in college football, not to mention the most entertaining as well. The Ducks finished the season ranked first, third and second nationally in scoring in Kelly’s finally three seasons, the kind of team that struck fear into opponents on every possession and won half their games before they got off the bus. Heck forget the Chip Kelly era. Wasn’t it was just two years ago that the Ducks had enough left over pieces to make the national championship game?

Only here we are, less than two full years later, and there’s no other way to put it: The Ducks are one of the worst Power 5 teams in the sport. They arguably play the worst defense in major college football (they ranked 109th in total defense coming into Week 6, before allowing nearly 700 yards to the Huskies), and an offense that once inflicted fear in opponents is pedestrian at best.

Speaking of which, with that fourth straight loss, the new reality for Oregon football is that after nearly winning a title two years ago, the Ducks probably won’t be bowl eligible in 2016.

They still have games with Stanford, Utah and USC remaining, and pretty much every game in the “Civil War” against Oregon State feels like a toss-up. To put this current plight in perspective, Oregon has lost four straight games. The Ducks lost four games in Chip Kelly’s final three years in Eugene.

And while you can point to a lot of different reasons for the Ducks’ swift and sudden fall, they all center around one thing: Helfrich.

The signs have been on the wall that maybe he wasn’t “the guy” almost from the beginning. There was an embarrassing loss to Arizona in his first year on campus, and a couple more last year, capped off by that stunning loss to TCU in the Alamo Bowl in which they blew a 35-point lead in the second half. There was of course the run to a title game in between, but at this point, the question has to be asked: How much quicker would this fall have come if it weren’t for the star players Kelly recruited and Helfrich inherited? How much did guys like Marcus Mariota, DeForest Buckner, Arik Armstead and Ifo Ekpre-Olomu mask Helfrich’s inefficiencies as a coach?

It’s a fair question, and one that will be asked quite a bit about Helfrich in the coming days. Frankly, a lot of questions will be asked, and none of them are good.

Saturday might not have been the end of the Mark Helfrich era in Eugene.

But the end does seem inevitable.