As a senior at
Milwaukie High School, Ecklund was named to the Metro all-star team at fullback. He was a four-sport star—in baseball, track, basketball, and football—and was drafted by the
Philadelphia Athletics, but turned down baseball for a football scholarship at the
University of Oregon. He never played for a team—freshman, varsity, military or Oregon—for which he was not named captain. He never played in a league where he was not named on the all-conference team—at fullback in high school, in college or as a professional. Ecklund matriculated at Oregon in 1941, expecting to play
fullback. But the Webfoots were loaded in the backfield, and weak up front. Coach Tex Oliver moved the massive Ecklund to
center during fall camp. By the first game, at Stanford, he was first string. He started every game, but flunked out of school. In his second season, World War II erupted and Ecklund joined the
Marine Corps. He took up boxing for fun, becoming the Marine Corps
Golden Gloves champion. He played for the Naval Air Station football team in Jacksonville, Florida for two years, before being dispatched for overseas duty at Okinawa. He learned what it meant to be a member of team in the South Pacific, fighting in interminable battles from island to island. "I was in the second wave," he said in 1993. "It was the guys in the first wave who got their butts shot up." Eckland returned to Oregon in 1946. "By being four years in the service, they forgave me" for flunking out, he said. "When I came back, I never made less than a B average. I'd matured and realized what I almost lost." In the next three years, playing both sides of the line, he averaged over 50 minutes per game. He was All-
PCC in 1947 and 1948. On Oregon's 1948 team, Ecklund played all 60 minutes of five games—Stanford, USC, Michigan, St Mary's and Washington—and was only knocked out of one game all year, when an Idaho player kicked him in the head 4 minutes into the 3rd quarter. He graduated from Oregon in 1949 with degrees in health and physical education. Ecklund was a charter member of the
Oregon Sports Hall of Fame. In 1999, he was inducted into the University of Oregon Athletics Hall of Fame and was named University of Oregon "Lineman of the Century". ==Professional career==