JUST LET IT GO

Fear of failure made Oregon QB Dennis Dixon question his skills. But a summer spent roaming minor league outfields taught him that failing is part of the game.

The voice inside Dennis Dixon's head will not shut up.

Don't make a mistake. Don't make a mistake.

It's 11 a.m. on a dreary Tuesday morning, one of only two days per week that the quarterback for fifth-ranked Oregon toughs out an hour of class.

He graduated in June, the first in his family to do so, after three-and-a-half years of 16, sometimes 18, credits a term. So this semester, with sociology degree in hand, he is dedicating himself to his final season of football, no distractions.

Well, except this billiards class. Today's lesson plan almost makes him laugh. "This morning," says the instructor, Dominic, a 21-year-old senior, "we're going to learn to scratch."

Dixon is an eager student. He crouches toward the pool table for a closer read, slides right and scans the flat, green expanse in front of him. Dominic, a little impatient teaching his third class of the day, delivers instructions. "Lower your arm, Dennis." Dixon relaxes his shoulder and drops his right elbow. "Soften your touch." The quarterback releases the tension in his grip. "Now scratch."

Dixon draws back his stick and gently nudges the cue ball. His aim is true as the purple four ball gently rolls into the corner pocket. But the cue ball stops, balancing perfectly on the lip. "I don't know if I can do it," Dixon says.

"Try again," says Dominic. "If you know how to scratch, you'll scratch less often." Now he's speaking Dixon's language. "I got ya," Dixon says, flashing a grin. "Line 'em up again."

The Dennis Dixon of last year—the junior who threw 13 interceptions and went 44 in Pac-10 play before losing his starting job—believed that one mistake would bring the world, and his team, crashing down around him. But this is a changed Dennis Dixon. One mistake, and the game isn't over. One error, and the drive isn't over. Sometimes, even the play isn't over. This Dennis Dixon now knows that mistakes do not define a player. The next play does. This Dennis Dixon has learned how to scratch.

Sometimes Dixon wishes he had a DeLorean with a flux capacitor so he could travel back a year and get in the ear of his former self. It would save a lot of heartache and sleepless nights.

His frustration with last season is why he did what he felt he had to do this summer. No, scratch that—what he wanted to do. Dixon exchanged off-season 7-on-7 drills with his Oregon teammates for a summer job (okay, a great summer job) as an outfielder for two rookie league teams in the Braves system. Football had become a nightmare, at times so bad that he had thought about quitting. But baseball was a dream, the what-if scenario he had passed over four years earlier.

Dixon had been a star outfielder and quarterback at San Leandro High in Oakland. He had size (6'4", 200 pounds), speed, a rocket launcher of a right arm and he batted lefty. He was projected to go in the first or second round of the 2003 amateur baseball draft, but teams got spooked by his rising football stock; they weren't about to waste a pick on an 18-year-old being recruited by Oregon, UCLA and Washington who they heard had Heisman hopes. Still, when the Reds drafted him in the 20th round of the 2003 draft, Dixon wasn't exactly committed to playing college football. "If the Reds had paid him a lot of money, Dennis never would have had a football helmet on his head," says his father, Dennis Sr. "It's that simple."

Dixon turned down the Reds but played baseball for Team USA's under-20 squad while he took a semester off and delayed his enrollment to Oregon. Finally, a week before his 19th birthday, in January 2004, he arrived on campus. Oregon almost felt like home. Growing up, Dixon often visited his uncles David and Donald, who live in Portland, a two-hour drive from Oregon's campus. They even took him to Eugene; once, while in high school, Dixon thought about sneaking into Autzen Stadium so he could "see what all the hype was about." He chickened out at the gate, but the program felt like it fit. Especially when, on his official visit, he got a look at the locker rooms with plasma TV screens and the indoor practice facility built with a reported $8 million from Nike honcho and Oregon alum Phil Knight.

And not for nothing, Dixon loves the swoosh. He owns at least 40 pairs of Nikes, including more than 20 Jordans. When he travels, he carries an extra bag just for his shoes. "Gotta love the mind of a kid," says Scott Natty, Dixon's offensive coordinator at San Leandro. "Most important decision of his life, and he's like, 'Coach, I hear the football team has special Nikes made just for them.' " Dixon could also continue to stoke his baseball fire. Knight's wife, Penny, runs a summer semipro baseball league, and Knight invited Dixon to "come on down and play anytime."

But when he arrived on campus, Dixon had more on his mind than playing in some sandlot games. His time with his mom, Jueretta, was running out.

Throughout high school, Dixon's mom had been sick with breast cancer. She fought it for years, silently at first, putting on the same winning smile she passed along to her son. "She kept it a secret from my sister and me for a long time," Dixon says. "She didn't want us to worry. We found out my junior year of high school, and I didn't know how to react." Jueretta still went to all his games—basketball, football and baseball—in fresh lipstick and with a scarf wrapped around her head to hide the effects of the chemo. So Dixon didn't wallow either. He asked about her cancer, trying to understand what was going on instead of wondering why this was happening to their family.

Jueretta was happy watching her son play ball of any kind, but she loved baseball. Once Dixon was enrolled at Oregon, his parents asked Ducks coach Mike Bellotti to guarantee in writing that he would never keep their son from playing baseball if the chance came up again. Bellotti obliged, putting the family at ease when they needed it most. Then, one month after Dennis started classes, Jueretta died.

Shortly after, Dennis had his mom's image inked onto the shoulder of his throwing arm. "I'm not much of a ritual guy," he says. "But it's helped. I rub it. I talk to her. And I pray." On the field, he says, he doesn't even notice when he reaches across his body with his left hand to rub his shoulder. After TDs he often pats his chest—where a charm engraved with Jueretta's image hangs from a necklace—then points skyward. "I'm thanking her," he says, "for guiding me through college."

Last year, though, he needed to look within. He led the Ducks to a 40 start by going 89-for-137 with six touchdowns against only two interceptions. Through the first month of the season, he had thrown 161 passes without an interception, a streak dating back to his sophomore year. But then, on Sept. 16, he tossed two interceptions in a win against Oklahoma, and three weeks later, he was picked three times in a 45-24 loss to Cal. The unflappable QB seemed to self-destruct. "Dennis faltered," Bellotti says. "And we didn't do a good job of supporting him."

Dixon's coaches didn't sit down with him to find out what was going on inside his head. Instead, seven games and eight picks later, they replaced him with Brady Leaf. Dixon had been 363 as a starter at San Leandro, with each loss coming in the state championship game against rival De La Salle. "You couldn't talk to him for weeks," says Dennis Sr. When Dixon lost the final game of each season, he spent two weeks locked away, kicking doors and beating himself up. He never learned to cope with being beaten. And when losses started to come in the middle of a season, well & "He was really struggling," Natty says. "He was thinking about not playing anymore."

After Oregon lost 38-8 to BYU in the Las Vegas Bowl in December, Dixon went home to Oakland to think, and to pray, about his future. Then, in February, came the call from the Braves.

Dixon hadn't swung a bat since high school, but Atlanta's brass had kept him on their radar. They saw his athleticism and invited him to work out. He struggled with the decision at first. Then he thought about why he'd come to college in the first place: to get an education and a job. "Baseball was a job opportunity," he says. "So I turned in my résumé and put my best foot forward."

Dixon worked out for the Braves three times and waited. Then on June 7, the Braves picked him in the fifth round with the 168th pick in the 2007 draft. It was decision time. Dixon's high school coaches advised him to stick with football. Bellotti urged him to hold out over the summer for more money and to dedicate his off-season to football. But on June 13, Dixon signed a pro baseball contract that included a $137,000 bonus and a clause that allows him to play two sports. "I wasn't thinking about the short term," says Dixon. "I was thinking about the long term." A few days later, Dixon flew to Orlando to join his new teammates in the Braves' minor league system.

Just around the time that the Braves came calling, Dixon was dealt another curveball. The Ducks had hired New Hampshire's Chip Kelly as their new offensive coordinator. Dixon, who'd already played for two others, figured Kelly would be just like his predecessors: a good coach but more concerned with X's and O's than getting to know his QBs. "I haven't had a close relationship with a coach since high school," Dixon says.

But Kelly didn't want to talk about stats or schemes when he first met Dixon. He didn't feel the need to rehash the past. Instead, Kelly asked Dixon how he wanted his teammates to remember him in 20 years. "He said, 'As a guy who contributed, but no more or no less than anyone else,' " Kelly says. "That's the kind of insight I need to construct an offense around him."

And when Dixon told him he was signing with the Braves, Kelly gave his QB insight into the kind of coach he is. "I told him I would support him," Kelly says, "and we'd turn it into a positive." Over the Fourth of July weekend, Kelly did something even more surprising: He flew to Orlando just to see Dixon play baseball, to see how he was handling life on his own. And he never mentioned football.
"I don't know another offensive coordinator who would do that," Dixon says. "It meant so much."

It helped Dixon deal with the tough days, like when he read the reports and heard the rumors from back home that people thought he was letting his teammates down, that he'd given up on football. "What really bothered me was that it was coming from our own fans," says senior receiver Garren Strong, Dixon's best friend and roommate. "We never doubted he was coming back. We knew he was dedicated to football."

Dixon kept his word in Florida, using downtime to study film, master Kelly's system and toss passes to his fellow outfielders. At night, he called his teammates in Eugene just to talk. "I told them I was dedicated," he says. "There are lessons everywhere that you can apply to football. I was learning to be a leader."

He was also learning that success is most difficult, and most rewarding, when it follows failure. "Baseball is all about repetition," says Dixon, who batted .176 in 28 games and struck out 22 times in his first season swinging a wooden bat. "I might go 0-for-3 one game, but if I have a doubleheader, my head can't be down. I have to get back out there and perform."

This fall, Dixon is playing with confidence. He's playing smart. And unlike last year, he's not playing scared. Credit that last part to Kelly, who at the start of the season had another heart-to-heart with his senior quarterback. "He told me that even if I threw an interception, I was still the man; I was his starting quarterback," Dixon says. "That went a long way. I started playing free."

Through seven games, Dixon is completing 69% of his passes and has scored at least one rushing and one passing TD in each game. More important than his stats, he's learned how to react to mistakes, how to rally from a loss. Take this year's game against Cal, the Ducks' only loss of the season. The old Dennis Dixon would have hung his head. This new guy? He invited teammates to his house after the game and hosted a fish fry.

Projected by one NFL scout as a fifth-to-seventh-round draft pick, Dixon's stock rises each week. "In some regards, he's the best I've ever had," says Bellotti, who has coached first-round QBs Akili Smith and Joey Harrington. "He has an ability to create that none of the others had. In some ways he's better than Vince Young. Vince is more physical, but he doesn't have Dennis' movement skills. And Dennis is a more accurate passer." Dixon will be drafted, Bellotti believes, and he won't have to wait until the fifth round. And that's when Dixon will have to make the toughest decision of his life.

"I'm just trying to find a good job," he says. "I have my degree. That's one option. I have a baseball contract. That's another. And if I'm drafted, I have football. That's another option. Any way you look at it, my future is bright."

Make no mistake.

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