LaBounty Is Oregon’s Reward for Persistence : College football: While studying films of a prized recruit, Ducks’ coaches discovered a scrawny kid whom they have molded into a tough defensive end.

Matt LaBounty’s story is an old one. Maybe it’s corny and, in these recruiting-mad days, unlikely. But it’s all his.

The University of Oregon coaching staff found him by accident. Studying the films of a prized recruit, they kept noticing this skinny guy from the other team making all the big plays.

Soon enough, they forgot about the first player and began to focus on LaBounty, then a 6-foot-4, 210-pound offensive lineman for San Marin High School in Novato.

LaBounty was all over the field, knocking down people, getting up and doing it again on the next play.

Well, the coaches said, if we could get him to put a little meat on those bones and drill him with some solid technique, we might be able to make something out of him.

They plotted further: We’ll have to get him off the offensive line, though, maybe to defensive end.

He was an all-league offensive lineman his senior season at San Marin, but only Washington State and Oregon State showed even lukewarm interest before Oregon.

Oregon Coach Rich Brooks, having only seen him on film, decided to take a closer look and arranged for LaBounty to visit Eugene. One look around the campus, and LaBounty, still surprised anyone was interested, was sold.

A raw high school senior in 1986, LaBounty became Oregon’s career sack leader in 1990. He’s also been named second-team all-Pacific 10 Conference.

A junior, he has managed to gain a few pounds along the way, beefing up to 251. Oregon coaches no longer refer to LaBounty as their “scrawny” defensive end. Now, he’s “undersized.”

Brooks also calls him surprising, along with aggressive, durable and tough.

LaBounty has started 23 consecutive games over the past two seasons at defensive end. He’ll be trying to improve his school-record 20 1/2 career sacks in start No. 24, when Oregon plays Colorado State Dec. 29 in the Freedom Bowl at Anaheim Stadium.

He has done this despite being outweighed by at least 40 pounds--often it’s 50 or 60--in every game.

“I can’t really say he’s ever been dominated, even when he was a redshirt freshman,” Brooks said before a recent practice at UC Irvine. “He just keeps coming. He still runs around like he weighs 210. Even though he’s bigger now, he hasn’t lost any speed.”

Without great girth, LaBounty gets by on technique. Often, he is tougher on himself than opposing quarterbacks.

“It just kills him when he doesn’t do something right,” Brooks said.

Some ends overpower offensive linemen on their way to a sack or a tackle. LaBounty simply is not strong enough, or big enough. So he studies films all hours of the night, stays low as possible on each play and runs around opposing linemen instead of trying to go through them.

“Basically, I got here by luck,” LaBounty said. “I don’t know how to explain it.”

Maybe, but now that he has arrived, there’s no holding him back.

In last season’s Independence Bowl, LaBounty chased Tulsa quarterback T.J. Rubley from sideline to sideline, forcing an incomplete pass. Oregon, playing its first bowl game since 1963, won, 27-24. LaBounty finished his sophomore season with 6 1/2 sacks.

LaBounty’s 10 sacks this season are two shy of the school single-season record of 12 set by Mike Walter in 1982. The Ducks have set a school team mark with 39.

None was bigger than LaBounty’s sack of UCLA quarterback Tommy Maddox late in the Nov. 3 game at Autzen Stadium in Eugene.

Oregon had stuffed UCLA’s rushing game all day, eventually limiting the Bruins to 71 yards. But Maddox passed for 332 yards and three touchdowns.

Late in the game, he was moving UCLA toward another score when LaBounty slipped past center Aron Gideon and dropped Maddox. It gave LaBounty the school career record and helped preserve a 28-24 victory.

And to think his only goal has been to start for three seasons at Oregon.

“I’m just so thankful to be playing,” he said. “Everybody in college knows somebody they played with who would have given their right arm to play college ball. I couldn’t ask for more, except maybe to play in the Rose Bowl. And I still have a chance to do that next year.”

LaBounty still remembers his high school days, when he tried all summer long to add bulk.

He once weighed 220 going into a season, but the extra pounds melted away during two-a-day workouts and he dropped to 207.

“It was all just fat,” he said, laughing.

There was something more beneath the fat, even if LaBounty couldn’t recognize it.

“When I watch my high school films,” he said, “I don’t know what they saw.”

Most likely, it was simply potential.