Fall Saturdays were different last year for Mark Helfrich.
Not bad. Just, different.
Nine months after he was fired as Oregon's coach in December 2016, Helfrich was in a three-man Fox Sports broadcast booth, part of his first foray into the media side of college football after 20 years coaching it. He sat in with coaches as they prepared. On game day, some of the electricity he felt as a coach returned. He spoke into a headset again.
"Game day was exciting," Helfrich told The Oregonian/OregonLive this week. "But postgame it was weird. The result didn't really matter.