During Mario Cristobal's first weeks on the job as Oregon's co-offensive coordinator and offensive line coach, he lived out of a Eugene hotel.
On the rare days last winter when work slowed to a manageable pace Cristobal, along with other UO staffers living in the same accommodations, faced a choice.
"Are you going to work, or try to find a house?" Cristobal said.
It should come as no surprise that Cristobal, 46, felt it was more valuable to spend the time persuading recruits to make UO their home than searching for one of his own.
Since his hiring in December, head coach Willie Taggart has stressed recruiting as the element that will either sustain or break the program and filled out his staff accordingly, hiring coaches skilled in the art of delivering four- and sometimes five-star prospects.
Building a top-10 recruiting class, not to mention developing players already on campus, takes time. Staffers arrive at UO's Hatfield-Dowlin Complex in the pre-dawn hours, between 4:45 and 6:15 a.m., and leave when it's dark again.
"Sometimes you'll stay till 2 in the morning," Cristobal said in a phone interview. "Sometimes you go home at 10:30."
Even judged against college football's skewed standards of what constitutes a regular week, where coaches' workloads are a constant churn of preparing your current players and recruiting futures ones, the past year has been an especially long grind for UO's assistants. In January, as recruiting entered its homestretch while UO's own momentum stood at a standstill, they joined Oregon from jobs across the country and tried to play catch-up.
National signing day in February bled into more recruiting, which led to 15 spring football practices and dozens of unofficial visits in April and cross-country recruiting in May. In June, coaches visited camps as far away as Florida while hosting a few of their own.
Only last week did many of UO's assistants leave for vacation. And even then, defensive coordinator Jim Leavitt wrote on Twitter, he was making recruiting calls as he was flying to Hawaii with his family.
The compensation is as considerable -- Oregon is paying Taggart $2.9 million this season, and his nine assistants more than $3.9 million -- and the expectations are high.
For Cristobal, who was pried away from Alabama and Nick Saban in a different kind of recruiting coup for Taggart -- Cristobal was named the country's top recruiter by 247Sports in 2015 and was ranked second upon his hiring -- work like this is nothing new. His responsibilities in Eugene evoke memories from his childhood and lessons from his first full-time job as an assistant at Rutgers, a program few once dared go near.
The lessons learned there are still paying off, 14 years after he left its New Jersey campus.
"The work won't be compromised, it just won't," Cristobal said. "That's the best part of the job. There's work to be done."
LESSONS FROM RUTGERS
Cristobal coached Alabama's offensive line in the College Football Playoff national title game on Jan. 10. On Jan. 13, he took the UO job. On Jan. 15, he was playing an exhibition basketball game at Matthew Knight Arena against Ducks players whose names he did not know, alongside new coworkers he knew tangentially.
He'd changed jobs and swapped out one team's apparel for another, but the work never really stopped. This excited him then, and still does now.
Cristobal comes by this glass half-full way of looking at 90-hour weeks honestly.
Cristobal's parents left Cuba in the early 1960s and arrived in Miami, where they met. They often had multiple jobs, teaching him few things were more important than hard work. Family trips to amusement parks were even serious events; Cristobal recalls his grandfather waking him up before dawn to beat the crowds.
"My best way of honoring them is making sure I'm keeping my foot on the gas and doing everything as the highest level I can do it at," he said.
Cristobal followed his older brother to Miami, where he won two national tiles and became an all-conference offensive lineman. In 2001, after a brief pro career and several years as a Miami graduate assistant, he became a full-time assistant for the first time at Rutgers.
The Scarlet Knights had had two winning seasons in their previous 13 by the time coach Schiano arrived from Miami. Rutgers claims itself as college football's birthplace. But in the coaching community, it had a reputation as a place where careers died. Cristobal discovered this when another Hurricanes assistant left a newspaper article on his desk describing the difficulty of winning in northern New Jersey.
A meal with recruits during one of the staff's first weekends hosting players on campus underscored that point.
"The server asked, 'What are you guys recruits for?'" Cristobal said. "They said, 'Rutgers football.' The server said, 'You don't want to go there, they're not very good.'"
Schiano and his staff set out to prove otherwise. Recruiting became an all-encompassing mantra, applicable to hiring behind-the-scenes staffers, making inroads with local high school coaches, persuading fans to attend, and even warming up cynical restaurant servers.
Cristobal went from convert to zealot.
"We just dove in full speed," Cristobal said. "I just remember not having cable TV and not worrying about it. I just remember not seeing anything in the daylight. Back then 'Interview with a Vampire' was a big movie and we were like vampires. Just going, going, going."
Cristobal watched the program's breakthrough 11-2 season in 2006 from Miami, where he'd returned after three seasons at Rutgers to rejoin the Hurricanes staff. The experience, however, had confirmed to him that all things were possible through recruiting. And all things in recruiting were possible through constant work.
Seeing a similar opportunity in 2007, he took over Florida International, a three-year-old program with an 0-12 record the year before, academic sanctions, one of the lowest Academic Progress Rates in the NCAA, multiple players with off-field legal issues and no weight room.
"Actually, it was two racquetball courts that were gutted," Cristobal said. "And we were still using a high school stadium."
Cristobal inherited a Florida International program mired in losses and off-field issues in 2007. "But we felt we could just buckle down and recruit. Right coaches, right people, against all odds, with as little support as you could imagine," he said. Friends again offered warnings.
"They had asked me, 'Are you trying to commit career suicide?'" Cristobal said.
Cristobal saw the fertile recruiting area of South Florida, his backyard. T.Y. Hilton, a receiver from Miami Springs, committed. Four seasons later, he was a third-round NFL draft pick.
Cristobal didn't have a big budget, so his staff ate Cuban dinners prepared at his house. FIU improved from 0-12 the year before he took over to 7-6 and 8-5 in 2010-11. He was fired following a 3-9 season in 2012 in a move regarded in the Miami press as a hair-trigger decision by an impatient athletic director. FIU has not had a winning season since.
"We felt we could just buckle down and recruit. Right coaches, right people, against all odds, with as little support as you could imagine," Cristobal said. "Tremendous lesson from the days at Rutgers."
RECRUITS FLOCK TO UO
In late June, Cristobal hit a milestone.
"I would say yesterday was the first time I came up for air and saw the family and saw Eugene in the daylight," he said.
All that matters is that recruits like what they see when they visit. Oregon is No. 6 in the country in 247Sports' composite ranking of the 2018 recruiting class and the same service ranks UO assistants Keith Hayward and Raymond Woodie currently among the top 11 coaches in the country. Staffers get along with each other to an unusually high degree, Cristobal said, and that has driven competition in recruiting within UO's offices.
"We always felt like if we just worked our tails off every day, which we do on recruiting, and get them here, we've got just as good a shot as anybody," Taggart said in May.
The success has so far defied the long-standing belief that Oregon, due its distance far from traditionally recruit-rich regions, struggles to attract the country's best players. Between 2008-16, Oregon's recruiting classes finished an average of 19th nationally between Scout, Rivals and 247Sports' rankings. Of course, Rutgers and FIU had their disadvantages, too. Cristobal found ways to minimize them.
"It's not distant memory in terms of all the great things that have been accomplished here," Cristobal said. "You go back coach (Rich) Brooks and coach (Mike) Bellotti and coach (Chip) Kelly and coach (Mark) Helfrich. There's a lot of great things that have been done. You know what, it didn't go well for a little bit, and that's all right. Football is sometimes cyclical but we've been afforded this opportunity."
For what it's worth, Cristobal found a house in Eugene not long after he was hired. And all the better it happened quickly, too. More time to focus on work.
-- Andrew Greif
agreif@oregonian.com
@andrewgreif