Bellotti restores calm after the storm.

Byline: Ron Bellamy The Register-Guard

STANFORD, Calif. - It was halftime at Stanford Stadium, and the Oregon football team had just lost three fumbles, and the Cardinal had scored 28 straight points, and the No. 13 Ducks were trailing, and coach Mike Bellotti was ... calm?

"Coach Bellotti was the calmest I've ever seen him, especially for us to be down to a team that we think that we can most definitely beat," running back Jonathan Stewart said. "He came in real confident and just pretty much poised and made us poised.

"It starts with your head coach leading his team with poise. ... I mean, you're going to have that coming out in the second half."

Said quarterback Dennis Dixon: "Coach Bellotti gave us a test at halftime, and said we had to erase it and that it was 0-0. And I think we responded quite well on both sides of the ball."

In the same place where, two years ago, Bellotti swung a sledgehammer in a bit of halftime theatrics, the Oregon players apparently got themselves back on track at halftime en route to a 55-31 victory over the Cardinal.

"That's our job," Stewart said. "You can't place that on the coach. It's our job to come out there and lay the hammer and that's what we did. ... It's not the coaches' job to pump you up. You got to be able to pump yourself up."

Although three of Stanford's four touchdowns were set up by Oregon fumbles, players said there was no finger-pointing at halftime; UO defenders said they should have stopped the Stanford drives, and they responded with a shutout in the second half.

"We've got to be able to handle fumbles," defensive end Nick Reed said. "We should be able to stop them. It was our fault. We should have kept them out of the end zone and helped our offense out."

Rover Patrick Chung, who had a second-half interception, said "we had a long talk in the locker room. People got focused, people got hyped."

The Oregon comeback actually began just before halftime; after Stanford took a 31-21 lead with 48 seconds remaining, Stewart returned the ensuing kickoff 64 yards and the Ducks got a field goal with four seconds remaining to stop the bleeding.

"Runs like that build confidence for a team and get a team pumped up and also kills the confidence for the other team at the same time," said Stewart, who finished with 310 all-purpose yards, a career best. (In the last two weekends, he has tied and then broken his career best, with a combined 532 all-purpose yards in the wins over Fresno State and Stanford.)

In the third quarter, with Oregon leading 38-31, the UO defense came up with a key stop on fourth-and-one to set up another Oregon touchdown.

"Big turning point," Stewart said. "Different momentum changes ... You see it all over the nation, teams getting upset because of different momentum changes."

In the second quarter, the momentum wasn't Oregon's, but the Ducks overcame that.

"We showed a lot of character today, coming back from the second quarter in the second half and just pretty much playing our game like we were supposed to in the first half ...," Stewart said.

"We knew that the only team on the field that can beat us is ourselves, and that's pretty much what went on in the first half. Turnovers, we gave the ball away, and they capitalized on them. ... When you play football you just have to go at it 110 percent and stay hungry the whole game. ..."