This season Mark Helfrich takes over as Oregon’s new offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach. Coach Helfrich spent the past three seasons in an identical role at the University of Colorado. The Oregon native and the Ducks’ former graduate assistant was a four year letter winner as quarterback of Southern Oregon University. It was there that Mark Helfrich became a NAIA Scholar-Athlete as a sophomore in 1993, leading the nation in total offense.
Before coaching at Colorado, Helfrich helped create one of the most dominant passing attacks in the nation at Arizona State. It was there that he coached quarterback Andrew Walter, who set school records for both career (85) and single-season touchdowns (30) in addition to shattering the previous Pac-10 record for career touchdown passes, previously set by Stanford’s John Elway (77). At Arizona State, Coach Helfrich’s quarterbacks put up numbers that ranked in the top three in the Pac-10 all five years he was there, leading the league twice (2004, 2005) and finishing second in 2001. His units also finished among the top 10 in the NCAA on three different occasions, as ASU was ranked fifth nationally in 2004 and ninth in 2002 before the school’s highest finish ever with the third place effort in 2005.
Previous to coaching at Arizona State, Coach Helfrich spent three years as the quarterback coach at Boise State, where he tutored one of school’s all-time greats in Bart Hendricks, the 1999 and 2000 Big West Conference Player of the Year. In 2000, he guided the Broncos to the country’s fourth-best passing offense with 321.5 yards per game.
