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With Oregon's hire of Tosh Lupoi, potential payoff justifies price tag

Jarrid Denneyby:Jarrid Denney•01/07/22•

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Photo by: 2019 Nick Cammett/Diamond Images via Getty Images

Tosh Lupoi’s feats on the recruiting trail are the stuff of legend.

In 2010, as an under-the-radar 28-year-old position coach at Cal, Lupoi was so effective in selling the middling Golden Bears program that Rivals named him the National Recruiter of the Year.

That same year, 247Sports tabbed him as the No. 5 recruiter in the country — 119 spots higher than any other Cal staffer.

As an assistant at Alabama, Lupoi was primarily responsible for the signings of Tua Tagovailoa, Trevon Diggs, Jonah Williams, and Jaylen Waddle. All four went on to become first- or second-round NFL Draft picks, and yet, none of them even crack the top five of his all-time recruits list.

National recruiting analyst Greg Biggins has reportedly said Lupoi is on the Mount Rushmore of the best recruiters he’s ever covered.

“He’s special,” Galu Tagovailoa, Tua Tagovailoa’s father, said of Lupoi when talking with Matt Zenitz in 2017. “He’s one of the biggest reasons, besides coach Saban, that we’re so fully committed to Alabama.”

That is what Oregon is getting in Lupoi: an elite, relentless recruiter who is capable of landing any prospect in the country.

On Wednesday the Oregon Board of Trustees Executive and Audit Committee approved a three-year, $5.1 million deal for Lupoi to become the Ducks’ next defensive coordinator.

The $1.7 million annual base salary detailed in the contract would have made him the seventh-highest paid assistant in all of college football last season, according to USA Today. It’s an enormous gamble for Oregon’s athletic department and first-year head coach Dan Lanning.

If Lupoi lives up to his recruiting reputation, the deal will look like a bargain three years from now.

Of course, recruiting is only part of the job.

A vocal sector of Oregon’s fanbase is jaded after four years of watching Mario Cristobal haul in elite recruiting classes, only to deliver disappointing results on game day.

It’s understandable that alarm bells are ringing as they watch Lanning assemble a staff of recruit-first guys.

Lupoi’s lone season as a college defensive coordinator at Alabama was an overwhelming disappointment by the lofty standards of the Tuscaloosa faithful. The Crimson Tide finished the 2018 campaign with just the 12th-best scoring defense in the country — a sharp dropoff from the year prior — and got boat raced by Clemson in the national title game.

But Nick Saban doesn’t just hand anybody the keys to his defense, and it speaks volumes that he entrusted Lupoi as his DC. Lupoi was also a highly-effective position coach and co-DC on Crimson Tide teams that led the nation in scoring defense in 2016 and 2017.

Since then, three different NFL head coaches have thought highly enough of Lupoi to employ him as a position coach.

Also, pairing Lupoi with a defensive-minded head coach like Lanning would seem to be the key to getting the best out of him from an on-field standpoint.

There’s an inherent risk with any hire, of course. Lupoi landed in hot water at both Cal and Washington for alleged recruiting violations. It’s possible that Lincoln Riley’s arrival at USC diminishes Lupoi’s effectiveness in recruiting the state of California.

But Lanning needed to take a swing for the fences to ensure that Ducks remain one of the nation’s elite recruiting programs. There’s arguably no bigger swing than Lupoi, and it will be fascinating to see how the first act of his tenure in Eugene unfolds in the coming months.

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