EUGENE — Mario Cristobal is looking to fill two critically important positions on Oregon’s football staff: A wide receivers coach and director or recruiting. But the coronavirus pandemic has brought about a hiring freeze at UO that, combined with uncertainty as to the 2020 season, makes the timetable for hiring unclear, at best.
Both jobs were open prior to the suspension of all team activities in the Pac-12 and across college sports last month. Cristobal has interviewed candidates remotely, but it remains unclear when he’ll be able to make a hire, though there isn’t necessarily a rush since there is a suspension of all in-person coaching and recruiting through the end of May.
“We continue looking for the best possible candidates for all positions,” Cristobal said on a conference call Friday. “When we figure out what the processes are from the university and whatever benefits the university best.”
Cristobal is known for conducting rigorous interviews, spending hours meeting with candidates to go over schemes, film of their players, Oregon’s players and recruits and other topics. Though harder to do all that remotely, Cristobal said that process hasn’t changed structually speaking.
“You maintain the same process you just don’t do it face-to-face,” he said. “You do it via Facetime. You do it via watching videos because of modern technology and the way things are, your access, you’re watching guys in action, you’re watching guys coach and teach and perform at clinics and being able to assess the presence of a guy, his knowledge, the way he connects with people and then researching places that they’ve been and what they’ve done. I think that you can make up for some of it. As we know, there’s nothing like being in a room face-to-face with someone and getting a feel for what they are and how they do things. Certainly managing the best way we can and with our processes as detailed and as thorough as they are we’re going to continue along the lines and control what we can control and find the best candidates for the position.”
Oregon athletic director Rob Mullens is taking a 10 percent pay cut for at least the next six months and possibly through the 2020-21 academic year, joining UO president Michael Schill (12 percent cut) and 10 other university administrators.
A source told The Oregonian/OregonLive that no other UO athletics personnel was taking a pay cut at this time.
Negotiations on a new contract were previously underway for Cristobal, who earned $2.6 million in salary plus $1,175,000 in performance bonuses while leading the Ducks to a Pac-12 Championship and Rose Bowl win last season and is due $2.7 million this season.
Cristobal said those talks “will resume when the time is appropriate.”
“Right now it’s not,” he said. “Right now the most appropriate thing to be attending to is the welfare, the safety, the health of our football players, our staff and all that stuff. That’s what the focus is as of right now and when the time comes we’ll appropriately address the rest.”