Oregon Football: More Than The Swoosh and Trend-Setting Uniforms

Recently Michael Kruse pondered on Grantland.com, “How Does Oregon Football Keep Winning?” The sports and pop culture website essentially concluded it was due to the unique relationship between Nike Chairman Phil Knight and the University of Oregon; more specifically, the innovative and much talked about football uniforms Nike designs and produces for the Ducks. Continually. Oregon’s uniforms change faster than coach Chip Kelly‘s blur offense scores. A U of O alum, Knight ran under legendary track coach Bill Bowerman in the 50s, and supplied cult running legend Steve Prefontaine with Nike’s revolutionary footwear in the early 70s.

Said Kruse:

There is next to no reason the University of Oregon should have a good football team. Eugene is a small city and is not near a major media market, there’s very little local college-caliber talent, and for literally 100 years the Ducks did almost nothing but lose. But the past decade and a half has been different. They’ve been to the Rose Bowl, the Cotton Bowl, the Fiesta Bowl, and last year’s national championship game…

One cannot understate Nike’s role in Oregon’s success. Knight has pumped more than $300 million into Oregon’s facilities to make them second to none. Nike and the Ducks are forever linked. After all, the sportswear and equipment giant was invented in Eugene, by UO track luminaries. Being a laboratory for possibly the most recognizable brand in the world has its perks. Therefore, Kruse’s analysis that uniforms keep allowing Oregon football to win is somewhat true in that the uni’s attract 17 and 18-year-olds from across the country who are great football players. However, as Oregon football continues to permeate the national landscape, it is important to understand that much more than the swoosh and a decade and a half of success is to thank for Oregon’s rise.

Let’s address Kruse’s claims that there is next to no reason UO should have a good football team.

1) Eugene is a small city. Eugene is a small town. But 350,000 people live in the Eugene-Springfield metro area i.e. it’s not that small. By comparison, Lincoln, Nebraska has 259,000 people (Children of the Corn), the Gainesville metro area has 258,000 people (Gator-Aid), the Tuscaloosa metro area has 211,000 people (Roll Tide), and Happy Valley has about 85,000 people (Nittany Lions). You get the idea. The population in Eugene is plenty big to support big-time college football. In fact, as seen in the South, smaller communities without an NFL presence in the state often have the most rabid college football cultures.

2) Eugene is not near a major media market. The largest city in proximity to Eugene is Portland, OR, indeed not a major media market. 120 miles to the north, Portland is the third-largest city in the Pacific Northwest behind Seattle, WA and Vancouver, BC. The Portland metro area is the 23rd most populous in the United States. PDX is right on the cusp of major market status. Once again, there is plenty of populace in the Willamette Valley to support big-time college football.

3) There’s very little local college-caliber talent. Kruse is right that the State of Oregon is not fertile recruiting ground for college football talent (the state produces only a few D-I players every year). But California is. Luckily for the Ducks, California is close by. In the late 90s and early 2000s, you could buy a t-shirt at The Duck Shop that said “University of California-Eugene,” in Oregon’s classic kelly green and gold block letters. The t-shirt was an irreverent homage to what largely helped build the Oregon football program: California talent.

4) For literally 100 years the Ducks did almost nothing but lose. But the past decade and a half has been different. There was unquestionably many bleak years in Oregon football’s history. But it wasn’t anything close to 100 years of utter futility. Kruse and others are wrong to assume there isn’t a solid football tradition at Oregon. They did make it to two Rose Bowls and win five conference championships before 1994; not all bad. If you peruse this chronology of Oregon football head coaches, you’ll see the Ducks were under .500 during coaching stints between 1938 and ’46 as well as 1967 through ’94. With 114 years under the program’s belt, that’s only 37 years of particularly poor play during coaching runs.

Bobby Moore (Ahmad Rashad) played at Oregon. So did Hall of Famers Norm Van Brocklin, Dan Fouts, Gary Zimmerman, Dave Wilcox, and Mel Renfro. Several former players, including Mike Nolan, Gunther Cunningham, John McKay, Jack Patera, John Robinson, and Norv Turner, have become head coaches for NFL and college teams. George Seifert coached at Oregon. Football tradition is alive and well in Eugene.

I consider myself something of an expert. I have sat in the same seat in Autzen Stadium since 1988 when I was the ripe old age of three. My father and mother both went to UO and have been around Eugene since the 50s. The stories of Oregon football’s true history of futility have been passed on. The best illustration of this was the Toilet Bowl in 1983, the Civil War rivalry game between Oregon and Oregon State that ended in a dark, dreary, rainy, zero-zero tie. There were eleven fumbles, five interceptions, and four missed field goals on that infamous Saturday. It was the last NCAA Division I football game to end in a scoreless tie.

Kruse and others are also wrong to assume that the most recent turn-around in Oregon football started a decade and a half ago. Rich Brooks coached the team from 1977-1994 and is generally credited with building the foundation for respectability on the field (no surprise, the Ducks play on Rich Brooks Field). Brooks posted a .456 winning percentage, culminating with a Pac-10 championship in 1994 and a berth against Penn State in the ’95 Rose Bowl before jettisoning to coach the NFL’s St. Louis Rams. Between Len Casanova‘s quality stint as head coach from 1951-1966 and Brooks, Oregon’s combined winning percentage was a paltry .352. Brooks and his coaching staff provided the building blocks for the program’s ascension. Which is to say: Oregon didn’t start winning in 1994 out of thin air. As far as results on the field go, the tide began to turn in the mid-to-late-80s on the backs of players like Chris Miller, Derek Loville, and Bill Musgrave. Nike became the uniform supplier for Oregon in 1996. They didn’t radically change Oregon’s uniforms until the 1998 Aloha Bowl, when the interlocking “UO” gave way to the new “O”, the helmets went from yellow to green, the green went from kelly to mallard, and the yellow from gold to lightning.

Kruse goes on to say:

The football Ducks of Oregon are something new. They didn’t get people to watch because they got good. They got good because they got people to watch. They are college sports’ undisputed champions of the 21st century’s attention economy.

Economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources. In today’s world, information isn’t scarce. Stuff isn’t scarce. What’s scarce is attention. No one understands the economics of attention better than Nike and the Ducks. But they absolutely got people to watch because they got good. In the early nineties, you could show up at Autzen ten minutes before kickoff, buy your tickets, and lay out a blanket on the 50 yard line. The successes of the early nineties, including a win over Ty Detmer’s #4 BYU Cougars in Autzen, the Rose Bowl berth in 1995, the Cotton Bowl in 1996, and increasing the season win total by one every year from 1996-2001 (6 to 11 wins) had everything to do with more people watching. Oregon’s recruiting has launched to unseen heights in recent years, but not during this era. Coaching of under-identified recruits was still producing success on the field.

Nike’s sports marketing prowess, the 2001 “Joey Heisman” billboard in NYC, other billboards in Los Angeles, etc. helped Oregon in the attention economy. However, that all falls flat without wins on the field. In fact, it probably doubles down on your losses as your perception becomes all about hype that cannot be backed up with substance, something the Ducks have fought during some disappointing seasons within this great run. Recruiting is the life blood of college football as they say, but talent never guarantees great teams. Oregon has sold out Autzen Stadium for 74 consecutive games, dating to 1999. That is right around the time the new uniforms popped up, though it was also the time Oregon had strung together a great decade of football. If you want to argue that they went from good to great because Nike’s uniforms got kids to watch across the country, that’s a definite part of it. But it still ignores crucial elements like excellent coaching and player development. UCLA professor Richard Lanham wrote a great book titled The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information. In it he explained, “If attention is now at the center of the economy rather than stuff, then so is style. It moves from the periphery to the center. Style and substance trade places. Push style to the extreme and it becomes substance.” In Oregon’s case, now a national brand on the recruiting trail, Nike’s style helps pull in the upper echelon athletes which have helped Oregon create the substance. You must still create it, though. And coach’s personalities in the living room still goes a long way in recruiting.

After Brooks’ run, his offensive coordinator Mike Bellotti took the reigns from 1995-2008, creating one of the most consistent winners in the Pac-10. Bellotti became the winningest football coach in Oregon’s history in 14 short seasons, posting a .678 winning percentage. Bellotti and the Ducks shared the Pac-10 conference title in 2000 with Northwest rivals Oregon State and Washington and won it outright in 2001. He owns the first four ten-win seasons in school history (2000, 2001, 2005, 2008) and led the Ducks to a final #2 ranking in 2001, where Oregon first entered the national championship discussion.

Which leads us to a pretty obvious statement: Oregon has had great coaching. Even better, Oregon has had great stability on its coaching staff. In an industry that is inherently unstable with constant turnover, Oregon has retained the core of their staff for about twenty years. Gary Campbell, the running backs coach, has been at Oregon for 27 years! Find me three assistants elsewhere with that kind of tenure. Defensive Coordinator Nick Aliotti has logged 19 years with the Ducks over three stints. Which becomes a familiar pattern. Coaches who leave Oregon to try out the NFL or other opportunities often end up coming back. Offensive Line Coach Steve Greatwood has coached 25 years at his alma mater over two stints, including 19 guiding the O-line. Tom Osborne, the special teams coordinator/tight ends coach, has ten years at Oregon under his belt over two stints. Linebackers Coach & Recruiting Coordinator Don Pellum has spent 23 years as an Oregon assistant. Jim Radcliffe is now in his 26th year as the school’s head strength and conditioning coach. And on and on. Quality coaching, familiarity, and continuity are the hallmarks of the Oregon football program. Once people get a job there, they simply don’t want to leave.

Chip Kelly's mantra: Win The Day

Oregon’s coaches have made a living developing players. Back before Oregon was pulling three, four, and five star recruits, they were getting a lot of unranked guys and coaching them up. It’s only been in the last few seasons that Oregon has had a budding national recruiting reach. Today, it isn’t unusual to see Puddles Express snag players from states like Florida, Michigan, Iowa, Illinois, North Carolina, and Texas. Not to mention continuing with the bread and butter of California, Washington, Nevada, and Arizona talent. The only difference now? Oregon’s coaches are the same great football minds with the same ability to develop players. It’s just now they’re working with an entire squad of über-talented, athletic freaks.

Oregon football is something college football tradionalists have been completely unable to wrap their heads around for years. Call it an East Coast bias. Call it selective thinking. Call it delusion in the case of Lou Holtz and his love affair with Notre Dame. Some folks have trouble evolving, but as with anything, the society doesn’t wait for you and neither does the blur offense. Middle-aged traditional members of the sports media have largely hated Oregon’s uniforms. Oregon and Nike could care less. The best high school football players in the country like them. Said renowned Nike designer Tinker Hatfield:

We wanted to be out there, to be purposely controversial. That’s a part of what we do that’s not very well understood. A lot of the sports writers at first hated it and that’s actually what we wanted. If you’re purposely trying to stir up the nest and increase visibility, you want them saying something.

Oregon’s emergence as a national power was far from overnight. With a culture of innovation, Chip Kelly and his staff at the helm, and the equally cutting edge Larry Scott at his post of Pac-12 Commissioner, the Ducks will be contending for national championships for some time to come.

Photo Credit: 1ac1sports.wordpress.com, BleacherReport.com, and GoDucks.com

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