The stories of the D-Boyz: How John Neal's secondary set the stage for everything to come

As Oregon continues to stockpile talent, we take a look back at the best backend ever assembled in Eugene — without the transfer portal.

John Neal and the 2006 Oregon secondary. (Courtesy of John Neal)

John Neal got an early start on his spring cleaning this year. 

Trapped within the confines of his Eugene home during a mid-January ice storm, the former Oregon defensive backs coach rifled through boxes accrued over his many years spent in the collegiate coaching world. 

Even after his 14-year stint with the Ducks ended in 2016, Neal kept the house he lived in, eventually returning there with his wife after a detour at UAB and brief return to the Oregon program as an analyst during the early Mario Cristobal days. 

Neal’s old office? Well, that lives on, naturally, through those boxes. Totems of his time in the role — now “forever” ago — strewn about, serving as mementos of an aging, yet indelible, phase of a career well-spent. 

The retiree dug up plaques and other trophies honoring his best players’ best seasons, and pictures adorned with autographs from those star pupils. He stumbled across Pac-12 Championship and BCS National Championship memorabilia; dug up a framed photo with a long crack through it, depicting him and his 2006 defensive backs room. 

Then Neal picked up his phone and started dialing. 

He phoned former safeties Marvin Johnson and Ryan DePalo and the multi-time Super Bowl-winning Patrick Chung. 

He called Matt Harper, another safety, who transferred into Oregon in 2006 from San Francisco City College, and later devised the ‘D-Boyz’ nickname by which the Ducks’ 2007 and 2008 secondaries are often referred. 

He exchanged messages with former NFL all-pro defensive back Jairus Byrd about golfing together in the near future, and would have reached out to fellow NFL standouts TJ Ward and Walter Thurmond had he not lost their numbers over the years. 

“There's a lot of great stories with those guys, man,” said Neal, recounting the Ducks’ defensive backs rooms between 2006 and 2009, likely his most talented group ever assembled. “Those were some great football players, all of them. And the main thing about all those guys is that they weren’t just great football players, they were really smart and unbelievable leaders, all of them. How do you get lucky to get all of that within one group?”

“Man, I had it made.”

There’s no shortage of pro players on Neal’s recruiting resumé. Still, it’s easy to see why those specific groups ignite such fond memories. The 2007 unit alone contained six future NFL defensive backs, to say nothing of Harper, who is now on his way to his second Super Bowl as the San Francisco 49ers special teams coordinator.

Five other Super Bowl appearances and a collective 33 seasons lie between Ward, Chung, Byrd and Thurmond — those secondary’s most recognizable members. 

Ask those former stars and they’ll certify: A handful of others had the talent to chase pro careers, the room’s sheer depth — and archaic NCAA transfer rules of the times — preventing the spotlight from ever reaching them. 

It’s what renders groups like the ‘D-Boyz’ more a relic of college football’s past, than a blueprint for its future, as the 2024 Ducks load up the backend with blue-chip transfers and elite high school prospects. 

Even so, the DNA of the ‘D-Boyz’ lives on in Eugene.

They brought a verve to the defensive backfield, helping spur a cultural turnaround that was later encapsulated through the oft-publicized “Win the Day” mantra, and can still be identified in the program. 

“To this day,” said Ward, “I believe that's why Oregon is on the trajectory that it is, because of the things (that group did). We didn’t have the team success you see now, but we were staples in creating what you see now.” 

In his coaching days, Neal carried a certain honesty. He told it how it was. Brutal, at times, but never so unbecoming that his players lost faith in his commitment to their success.

When he arrived at Oregon in 2002, Neal, by his own admission, told his defensive backs that every single one of his former UAB players were better than them. Not one of them could have started there. 

He once welcomed former NFL defensive back Keith Lewis, an all-conference honoree in 2003, into his office, telling him, “You're not as good as you think you are. You're not, but you can be a great football player. But you’ve got to do these things.”

Lewis was stunned, only later informing Neal that it was exactly what he’d needed to hear. He was among those who Neal reached out to last month, after finding Lewis’ all-Pac-10 plaque. 

Neal (GoDucks.com)

Just as it pushed Lewis to realize his potential, Neal’s honesty fostered accountability throughout the secondary. Thurmond recalls the first such showing coming during a positional meeting in early 2006, his freshman season. 

Neal addressed the team: “I pretty much handpicked a lot of you guys that are in this room. There's some accountability, because if you guys don't pan out, I'm going to get fired. I'm gonna have to move my family from here.”

The coach’s statements brought pressure on his players. What stuck out to DePalo — a junior during the 2006 season — however, was that it never appeared unwarranted. 

“He used to say things all the time, like, ‘Hey, I just want you guys to know, it's my job to out-recruit who's in this room right now,” said DePalo. “‘It's your job to not let it happen.’”

Added Byrd: “He gave it to you straight with a little bit of humor… I think that's what you appreciated about him… We knew where he was coming from, and he knew how to motivate each of us. He knew what buttons to push.”

Neal promoted a gung-ho approach in the defensive backfield. He brought energy, so his players matched it. He coached for turnovers, so his players attacked the ball in the air and strung out ball-carriers in the open field. His teams finished top-three in the conference in interceptions in six of his final 11 seasons in Eugene, and third or better in pass efficiency in nine of those same years.    

One of Neal’s best-loved ideologies revolved around the idea of “defining moments.”

“It wasn't a matter of how many reps that you got,” Thurmond remembers Neal preaching, “everyone's gonna have a defining moment. Who knows what that may be? But you know, at that moment, you can identify that situation (and) you can tell if that guy's a player or not.”

That was the standard of evaluation under Neal, and his beliefs sprouted from nonconformist recruiting methods. 

He didn’t scour the nation for its best defensive backs. Many team’s best players at the prep level kickstarted their team’s offenses, so he searched, first and foremost, for dynamism on that side of the ball. He looked for things he’d never seen before. 

“It's kind of funny because he saw more of my offensive (tape) than he did of my defensive (tape),” Byrd said with a chuckle.  

The play that ultimately drew Neal to the 2-star Byrd, was when the former high school running back leapt in for a two-point, game-winning conversion during his high school state title game. 

He was sold on a 2-star, 15-year-old Chung after watching a VHS tape of him detonate on a kick-returner without hesitation.  

He watched Thurmond, a 3-star who was also 15-years-old at the time, effortlessly clear a four-foot chain-link fence, over and back, before offering him a scholarship. 

And he tabbed Ward, a walk-on-turned-enforcer during his college days, as an untapped talent, bumping into him often while aiding in the recruitment of four of his teammates at De La Salle High School. 

Neal uncovered athletically-diverse players. Then he let them loose. 

“He made people feel like they could make plays,” said DePalo. “‘Don't be afraid, I'd rather you go 100 miles an hour and try to make a play then not at all and try to be hesitant.’”

Recounted Ward: “We rarely missed tackles because he was so detailed. One of his biggest points was being a great tackler, whether you play safety, corner, wherever you were on the field. He took pride in his group not having missed tackles and if we did miss tackles, it was surprising because we drilled open-field tackling almost every day. It's part of the reason why I tackled so well in college and in the NFL, because of what he told us.”

As Oregon’s offense raised eyebrows and out-distanced the competition with speed, aggressiveness and heady schemes, Neal treated his defensive backs as an offensive coordinator would his most explosive playmakers.    

“‘If you're competing, and you're making plays, I'll find a place for you.’ That was his biggest thing,” said Thurmond. “And he held true to that. There were no favorites. It was just like, ‘If you're playing and producing and you're a baller, I'm gonna find a spot for you on the field.’”

The wheels came off near the end of Oregon’s 2006 season. The Ducks dropped their final three games of the season, stumbling out of the top 25 and into a Las Vegas Bowl matchup with BYU.

Then the Cougars blew the doors off them in a 38-8 loss.   

“This team's falling apart,” Neal recalled thinking. “I knew it. Everybody knew it. We were losing our team.”

Head coach Mike Bellotti called his staff into a meeting the following Monday, once the dust of the backslide into a 7-6 finish had settled. He told Neal and others he wanted to yell and scream, but that it wouldn’t have been fair. Wouldn’t get them any closer to a solution, either. 

Bellotti wanted answers, after all, and quickly. 

“I want you to go home and think about what we need to do to improve this team,” he said. 

Things started to change in 2007. Chip Kelly arrived as offensive coordinator and began installing an offense that would guide the program to heights never before reached, and a select group of Oregon players took the onus upon themselves to see to it that the 2006 collapse would be an outlier and not a foreboding prelude of things to come. 

The defensive backs’ room was well represented in the turnaround, if not its driving force. Model athletes in the weight room (where some still hold school records) and on the practice field (where breaks were spent doing dizzying numbers of push-ups and sit-ups), Neal’s group began carving out a new standard. 

Birthed, in part, during the following offseasons, was the Ducks program of today.

Said Ward: “We made sure guys came to the offseason workouts. If you weren’t there, we blew up your phone. We organized all types of activities off the field. We took the younger guys literally under our wings.”

Said Thurmond: “The guys who were opposed to it started weeding themselves out. 

“It started becoming contagious.”

Team-wide competition peaked, defensive backs and wide receivers jawed, intensity rose, Oregon and its outlook the ultimate benefactor. 

Sometimes the trash talk went “too far,” said DePalo, but “that’s when you had your D-Boyz back you up.” He maintains that the coaches loved it, even if they couldn’t show it. 

“Once the offense started showing out,” said Byrd, “they had confidence, because they were just putting up crazy numbers. And then it was like, as a defense, we had to hold our own, too.”

The defensive backs hunted splash plays. They had their peers in their sights. Whenever one got an edge, the others fought to catch them. 

“If one person was slipping,” Byrd said, “it's like, ‘No, that's not it. That's not your standard. That's not you.’”

It’s what reminded Neal, all this time later, that he did, indeed, “have it made.” Talent was never short in his meeting rooms. In the years following, he’d recruit future NFL players John Boyett, Troy Hill, Terrance Mitchell, Ifo Ekpre-Olomu, Ugo Amadi, Brendan Schooler, Brady Breeze, Thomas Graham and Deommodore Lenoir.

But with the ‘D-Boyz,’ all Neal had to do was pull the right levers. The rest took care of itself. And he’d seen it coming years in advance. 

Chung and fellow safety Jerome Boyd redshirted as freshmen in 2004. They were “vicious,” remembers Neal, “wolverines.”

“You just did not want to mess with those guys,” he said. “And here are your fifth-year seniors that have been in the program. These are redshirt freshmen that, at that point, literally started to, in my opinion, change the culture of Oregon football just by their attitude and the way they loved to play football. They practice so freaking hard, all the time, on the scout team. They wanted to win the scout team.”

It spread throughout the secondary in 2005 and 2006. Then throughout the defense as a whole amid that critical 2007 offseason. 

The Ducks would finish 9-4 in 2007, three of their four losses coming after quarterback Dennis Dixon tore his ACL. All-time seasons followed. Oregon went 10-3 in 2008, before turning in a string of three-straight 12-win years, spurred on by Kelly’s move to head coach in 2009. 

“The mentality of the (Oregon today) is national championships,” said Ward. “When I was in school, when I got to Oregon, that was not our mentality. National championship was not even on our radar. ‘We're gonna play our hardest and see where it goes,’ type of mentality. It wasn't national championship, and ‘we're gonna win the Pac-12 this year. If we don't, it's a failure,’ type of deal.”

He sees the program’s growth since his days reflected in what he referred to as Dan Lanning’s “Natty, or bust” approach. 

In the midst of his days in green and yellow, Byrd never internalized the full scope of the talent at his sides. He wasn’t truly struck by the singular nature of that group until long after. Perhaps not until his eight-year NFL career came to a close. 

“You just appreciated their gifts,” he said, “their talents, their uniqueness.”

Some of the years are starting to blend together for Neal, who joked he needs someone to help him write a book on those teams. 

It wouldn’t lack for tales. 

“I can’t say enough good things about those guys,” he said, “because it’s real.”

With National Signing Day around the corner, Lanning’s Oregon program looks to put a bow on the school’s best recruiting class ever. The Ducks’ defensive backs, in particular, look as deep and talented as they have in years. The program’s best-ever secondary could well take shape in the years to come, but as Oregon continues to position itself for continued national-prominence, it’s unlikely there’ll ever be a group quite like the ‘D-Boyz.’ 

“The one thing that's remained,” said Byrd, “is the excellence. The standard has remained… That standard was set back then, and carried on till now.”

Echoed Thurmond: “That's ultimately what you want to do, is be able to create that legacy.”

It’s a legacy that still stands more than a decade later, reaching far wider than just the relics and memories saved in boxes by the coach who put it all together.

— Shane Hoffmann, for The I-5 Corridor