On an otherwise ordinary Saturday near the end of September in 1994, an important piece of college football lore began unfolding on the sidelines of Michigan Stadium, which is better known to college football fans as the Big House. For most of the afternoon, the fourth-ranked Michigan Wolverines obliged the oddsmakers as they laid the groundwork for a 26–14 rout of the visiting seventh-ranked Colorado Buffaloes. But with just over two minutes left to play in the fourth quarter, the Buffaloes scored a touchdown that put them back in the game.
The momentum shifted to the Colorado sideline as Rick Neuheisel rallied the team, exhorting them not to give up. Neuheisel was an assistant to the head coach of the Buffaloes. He earned a modest $60,000 each year to offer counsel, especially for Colorado’s quarterbacks and wide receivers. It seemed, however, that his counsel proved especially worthwhile that day. After Colorado forced a three-and-out, their quarterback Kordell Stewart completed a twenty-one-yard pass that left his team on its own thirty-six-yard line with just six seconds remaining on the game clock. The Buffaloes were trailing Michigan 21–26 and had time for just one more play.
Earlier in the game, near the end of the first half, Neuheisel had called for a Hail Mary play in a desperate bid to bring the Buffaloes back into the game. The team ran with his play, which backfired horribly.
“Ty Law intercepted the pass at the goal line,” Neuheisel said. “And never before in my life had I ever corrected a Hail Mary play, let alone drawn it up at halftime—but that’s exactly what we did.”
In the game’s closing seconds, Neuheisel once again called for Stewart to throw a Hail Mary, this time for a chance at pulling off an upset victory. He told running back Rashaan Salaam to block the three-man rush that came for Stewart, giving the quarterback just enough time to choose from the three receivers who had made it to the Michigan goal line. The clock ran itself down while Stewart adjusted his footing and calmly looked far downfield to find his receivers. The ball left Stewart’s hand just as the final second ticked away on the game clock, then hung in the air for three more seconds as it traveled nearly seventy yards downfield, where it bounced off the hands of Colorado wide receiver Blake Anderson before landing in the arms of wide receiver Michael Westbrook.
“So many things had to happen for that play to work,” Westbrook said.
After the game, television camera crews streamed into the locker rooms and found a euphoric Neuheisel waxing poetic about Colorado’s big win, which he said made him feel like “a little kid.”
The so-called “Miracle at Michigan” proved to be a defining moment for the Colorado team. Westbrook would later say catching Stewart’s Hail Mary pass that day was a bigger moment for him than winning the Heisman Trophy. It also proved to be a pivotal moment in Neuheisel’s career. Soon he was earning $256,000 a year as the head coach of the Colorado Buffaloes, and when he threw his hat into the ring for the top coaching job with the University of Washington in 1998, he was still trading on the legend of that Hail Mary play. Pushing forty and without a conference championship win on his résumé, Neuheisel’s contract with the University of Washington nevertheless made him one of just four college football coaches earning a seven-figure salary. When his $1-million contract with Washington was finalized in August of 1999, it amounted to $772,000 more than the university’s president earned at the time. The average University of Washington faculty member, meanwhile, earned just $60,000.
Neuheisel became a poster boy for college football’s financial arms race: a relatively inexperienced and unaccomplished coach with just enough television celebrity to earn him the kind of paycheck previously reserved for coaches at football powerhouses like Tennessee and Florida State. He was also illustrative of the changes that were sweeping the Pac-10 conference, spurred by Nike’s strategic spending on college football at Pac-10 schools like Oregon, Washington, and UCLA, the last of which raised its head football coach’s salary to $578,000 the same weekend Neuheisel received his $1 million job offer at Washington.
Some of the broader consequences of Nike’s spending on college football were unintended, if not unforeseeable: giving Oregon better facilities and world-class branding and marketing made the team better, which in turn forced other teams in the conference to spend more in an effort to compete. This increased competition made the conference itself more popular, and more valuable when it was time to renegotiate television contracts.
It was driven, in part, by the proliferation of Bowl money and increasingly lucrative television contracts. There were also more direct ways that Nike reshaped America’s public universities. By subsidizing pay for top coaches at multiple schools, for instance, Nike helped inflate the market value of a college football or basketball coach well beyond what a university could afford to pay under the old system; eventually, schools where Nike did not subsidize coaching pay used more of their students’ tuition dollars to hire competitive coaches, which then led the schools that did have Nike’s backing to spend more tuition dollars on top of Nike’s contribution. Before long, college football coaching contracts were layered with win bonuses and Bowl-appearance incentives that cost Nike, and the universities, more money.
The problems with these kinds of coaching contracts became obvious when Neuheisel’s first University of Washington contract crossed the desk of an official at the state ethics commission. Employees of the State of Washington are barred by law from receiving outside compensation for performing official duties, which meant that a public university should not be paying Neuheisel money to coach the school’s college football team while Nike was also paying him to do the same thing, with the caveat that he did it exclusively outfitted in the company’s shoes and apparel.
After Neuheisel signed with the University of Washington, Nike offered him $125,000 per year to exclusively wear the company’s products while coaching the Huskies, and whenever appearing on television broadcasts. He would also receive an additional $25,000 from Nike if the Huskies played in a Bowl game. But unlike Colorado, where Nike had been paying Neuheisel $100,000 to advertise their products during widely televised college football games, the State of Washington took issue with the questionable ethics of selling corporate advertising space on the backs of state employees. In the end, it hardly mattered—Knight knew how to navigate around these little roadblocks. And in this case, Washington taxpayers footed the bill for the attorneys who helped Neuheisel find a shortcut around the legal barriers that separated him from his Nike paycheck.
Two different attorneys from the Washington attorney general’s office argued the case—one representing the ethics commission and another representing the University of Washington, Neuheisel, and, effectively, Nike. The university first tried to make Neuheisel’s contract acceptable by changing some of the language: instead of being required to exclusively use Nike products while participating in athletic activities, he would be contractually obligated to exclusively use Nike products while participating in all “non-official athletic or athletic-related activities.” The assistant attorney general assigned to represent the ethics board didn’t know what to make of the revised contract.
“We do not know what a ‘non-official’ game or football practice or telecast is,” he wrote. What made even less sense, he added, was why Nike would pay Neuheisel $125,000 if not so that the University of Washington coach could help them sell shoes and apparel to college football fans.
The answer, according to the attorney general representing the school’s interests, was that “the private market has established the value of Mr. Neuheisel’s endorsement,” adding that “Nike is in the best position to determine this value.”
It took months to unravel and reassemble the contract so that Neuheisel could continue to receive his Nike paychecks while working for the state of Washington’s largest public university. The solution, in the end, was to circumvent Washington State ethics rules through a multilayered payment structure: Nike paid the University of Washington, which in turn paid Neuheisel the additional funds as part of his contract, which was amended to require that he wear Nike products exclusively, as an employee of the state, rather than in his capacity as an individual.
Late on the morning of July 27, 2000, Neuheisel was enjoying a leisurely game of golf when someone drove up in a cart and handed him a phone. The voice on the other end of the line belonged to one of the communications staff in the University of Washington’s athletics department: Jerramy Stevens, one of the school’s best football players, had been arrested on suspicion of rape just hours earlier, they told him. A SWAT team had descended on the home that the player shared with some of his teammates, where detectives executed a search warrant and took Stevens into custody.
Neuheisel called the school’s athletic director, Barbara Hedges, to see what kind of action the school would take. They acted quickly and decisively, and at 1:30 p.m. the lead detective in charge of the case received a fax from the law office of Mike Hunsinger, a University of Washington alumnus and longtime college football fan. He was going to be representing Jerramy Stevens, the fax said, and the detective in charge should contact his office immediately.
Hunsinger ran what could have amounted to a lucrative side business representing Neuheisel’s football players. A Seattle Times investigation identified at least fourteen members of Washington’s 2000 football squad who sought his counsel on a variety of criminal charges ranging from DUI and domestic violence to animal cruelty and sexual assault. The criminal charge he defended Stevens against related to an incident that had unfolded a month earlier, when a UW student called 911 to report a possible rape in progress shortly after three o’clock in the morning on June 4.
The 911 caller said he’d been walking back to his dorm, past rows of fraternities and sororities, when he saw a woman leaning against a wall, dressed only in a bra and maybe underwear, with her arms at her sides and a tall man facing her. It didn’t look right, the caller said—the woman had obviously seen him, but her eyes seemed glazed over and she made no effort to cover herself from the passing stranger who had happened by the scene; the man eventually took the woman behind a bush, but the police who responded to the call couldn’t find anyone in the area when they arrived.
Around noon the next day, a nineteen-year-old freshman awoke in her room at the Phi Beta Phi sorority, not far from where the incident had been reported. Her head throbbed, her stomach ached, and she had sore ribs and scratched legs. Her underwear was missing, and her bra was around her waist, covered in dirt. Her only clue as to what had happened to her was a fleece jacket that Jerramy Stevens had been wearing the night before, which had been left in her room, covered in dirt and smeared with blood. Later, when she recounted the evening’s events to Seattle police, she would tell them she’d had three beers at dinner before going to a fraternity party, where she had seen Stevens. The last thing she remembered was taking a drink from a beer that someone had handed her—a beer that had already been opened. After that, everything was blank.
When she talked to Stevens about that night, he told her they’d only kissed, but the girl was worried about an unwanted pregnancy, so she went with her parents to Seattle’s Harborview Medical Center, where staff found semen around her vagina and rectum, which doctors said had been lacerated. The semen was preserved for testing in a rape kit.
Detective Maryann Parker later told the Seattle Times that she immediately suspected the girl had been drugged without her knowledge, then raped. But by the time they were able to test her blood, too much time had passed for anything to show up in her system, and while Stevens had spent a night in jail, he didn’t answer any of Detective Parker’s questions. At his bail hearing, some of his teammates cheered in the courtroom when prosecutors asked the judge to release Stevens without charge, saying they’d need to take a closer look at the evidence. In the end, all that Parker managed to gain from the arrest was a sample of the suspect’s blood drawn for comparison with the genetic material recovered from the girl’s rape kit.
King County’s elected prosecutor, Norm Maleng, was furious when he learned that Stevens had been arrested. His office called Detective Parker in for a meeting and asked her to explain why she’d arrested a star athlete. Her superiors, who accompanied her to the meeting, told the prosecutors that she didn’t need their permission to make an arrest—just probable cause. And there was plenty of probable cause from the night in question, they said.
Hedges, meanwhile, assured members of the local media that the school would conduct a thorough investigation into what had happened that night. But that never happened. Instead, Hedges and Coach Neuheisel waited the scandal out while receiving regular updates from a prosecutor working in Maleng’s office, which seemed to have wrested control of the case from the Seattle police department. On August 17, two weeks before the start of the 2000 college football season, they were told that the result of DNA testing revealed that Stevens’s blood was a match with the sperm recovered from the girl’s rape kit. Stevens maintained that the sex had been consensual.
When prosecutors met with top police officials to discuss the case, five weeks after DNA testing linked Stevens to the alleged rape, they insisted that the football player not be charged until after he had been interviewed for his side of the story. In arranging that interview, Maleng’s office granted a number of unusual concessions: the interview would take place at Hunsinger’s office, rather than the police department; Detective Parker, who led the investigation and knew the evidence best, would not be allowed to ask the suspect any questions; and most unusually, the district attorney’s office agreed to hand over to Stevens and Hunsinger statements given to police by the accuser and witnesses. Typically, suspects are allowed to see the evidence against them only after they are charged, not before. Police balked at the terms, and the interview was canceled. It wasn’t the first time Maleng had made things difficult for police who went after UW athletes.
Two years earlier, he had declined to prosecute three football players who had beaten a student on campus while a crowd of witnesses watched. A year later, Maleng declined to prosecute another set of three football players, this time for an assault at a fraternity house. His argument that there was a lack of evidence was proved to be without merit by the city prosecutor, who took up the frat-house assault case Maleng had passed on, leading to three guilty pleas. On October 24, 2000, Maleng gathered members of the local media for a press conference where he announced that his office would not bring any charges against Stevens. The reason, he said, was “insufficient evidence.”
Detective Parker disagreed.
“I thought he should have been charged,” she told the Seattle Times. “From the police perspective, I think there was overwhelming evidence that a crime had occurred.”
The Stevens case, she said, had been “handled differently” than other rape cases Maleng’s office prosecuted.
“And we felt it was because he was a University of Washington football star,” she said.
Three days before Maleng’s press conference, Stevens scored a key touchdown in a win over California, bringing Washington’s record to 6–1. It was a pivotal moment on the team’s road to the Rose Bowl, which they won on January 1, 2001, with a 34–24 victory over Purdue. Stevens led the Huskies with five receptions that brought his season total to forty-three, making him perhaps the greatest tight end in the school’s history.
The football program that helped shield Stevens from rape charges secured significant financial rewards from the team’s 11–1 season and its Rose Bowl victory: contributions to the football program increased by $1.5 million, while ticket sales increased by another $1 million. Neuheisel’s improved record, meanwhile, increased the value that Nike got out of its side deal with the coach.
In 2002, Stevens left the University of Washington a year early, without graduating, so that he could begin a professional football career with the Seattle Seahawks. His NFL contract promised him $6.2 million over the course of five seasons. The next year, he was reunited with two of his former Huskies teammates in the courtroom after four University of Washington students sued the football players over sexual assault allegations Maleng had declined to prosecute.
In depositions, Hedges was asked to explain why her promised investigation into the Stevens case had never materialized. She said she felt there were no grounds for punishing Stevens or the other football players accused of rape, and so there were no grounds for an investigation. It’s hard to imagine Hedges making the same decisions, however, if it had been the rape victim, and not the rapist, who earned the school millions of dollars each year by wearing Nike shoes and apparel. Neuheisel, meanwhile, said that he only punished his players if they embarrassed themselves, their families, or the university—and while he admitted that the rape accusations had been an embarrassment for the school, the prosecutor’s decision not to go forward with charges led the coach to believe that “Jerramy was not the reason for the embarrassment.” For Neuheisel it was the victim, by implication, who had embarrassed the school.
For her, the intervening years had been tough. Abandoned by school administrators, depressed, and unable to face Stevens or his friends, she left UW and attended community college until the football player left the school. In her lawsuit, she was identified in court documents only by her initials, which Hunsinger seized on as a means of discrediting a girl who had already faced shame, scrutiny, or harassment from UW players, fans, or boosters. Rather than arguing the case on its merits, Hunsinger tried to stop the lawsuit by asking the judge to force the victim to use her full name in publicly available court filings. After the judge denied the motion, Hunsinger settled the case out of court in the spring of 2004. The woman who had accused Stevens of rape received a check from Hunsinger for $300,000, and signed an agreement barring her from talking about the case.
In the early days of “shoe money,” when it was against the rules for a university to sell its loyalty, or the loyalty of its student-athletes, Nike learned that it could get these things for free if only it bought loyalty from the coach. Years later, Nike was still buying coaches, and for higher prices than ever before. But recession and deepening cuts to funding for higher education meant that buying a college football coach might also win the loyalty of university administrators desperate to keep the school afloat. Neuheisel’s arrival at the University of Washington coincided with a sharp decline in state funding for the school, which subsequently raised its tuition and began recruiting more out-of-state students, just as the University of Oregon had done a decade earlier. To attract those students, the university bet on Nike and Neuheisel.
Two days before the biggest start of his college football career, in September 2003, sophomore Kellen Clemens was feeling overwhelmed in ways he had not anticipated—not by the pressure to perform against third-ranked Michigan, but by the sheer opulence of his surroundings in the Oregon Ducks’ new locker room. Clemens had grown up in Burns, Oregon, a logging community with less than three thousand residents, and he couldn’t quite wrap his head around the luxurious two-story locker room, which had cost $3.2 million.
“Things like this just blow me away,” he said. “Sometimes it seems like a bit much.”
As Clemens rummaged through his locker, which included a lockbox for valuables, three of his teammates lounged on a nearby sofa, where they played video games on a sixty-inch plasma-screen television. Dan Weaver, an offensive lineman, bristled at the assumption that posh facilities made for posh players.
“Just because we have a nice locker doesn’t make us soft,” he said.
In the afterglow of Harrington’s sterling tenure with the Ducks, with money pouring into the promising football program as never before, a new nickname began to take hold: the University of Nike. It was, unquestionably, derisive. But the extent to which the Ducks and their fans minded this mockery would depend on whether or not the team would continue to backslide in 2003, as they had in the losing 2002 season following Harrington’s graduation.
When Michigan arrived at Autzen Stadium on September 20, 2003, Knight left his private skybox in favor of a patch of artificial turf along the Oregon sideline. The Wolverines were coming off a decisive victory over Notre Dame and were scorching a path toward the team’s first national championship since 1997, while the Ducks remained undefeated by virtue of three less impressive victories, which revealed a defense as weak as head coach Mike Bellotti’s passing offense was strong.
As the tense match played out on the field, jeers from the visiting team’s crowd proved that Knight’s role in the drama of college football was not lost on Michigan’s tradition-bound fans: “Hey, Knight!” fans shouted when the Wolverines neared Oregon’s end zone. “How do you like that?”
At the end of the day, Knight liked it just fine; when the game clock ran out with the Ducks on top, Oregon improved its record to 4–0, and at the same time managed to stunt Michigan’s run at another national title. For Clemens and his teammates, the win was an important statement aimed squarely at those who accused the team of using Knight’s money to buy success. Bill Moos called it the most significant win in the history of the football program; in part because it was proof that bitter rivals had been right to think that money could give, and had given, the Ducks an edge that had previously eluded them.
USC and UCLA, as representatives of the old guard of the Pac-10 conference, had a much easier time talking potential recruits out of visiting Oregon before Knight built the Moshofsky Center, Moos said. And before the Joey Heisman billboard, they could tell recruits that no one would ever hear of them if they chose Oregon.
“Hey, guess what?” Moos said. “We’ll put you on a billboard in Los Angeles or San Francisco or New York. We’ll market you in ways no one ever imagined.”
The locker room, like the billboards and the indoor practice facilities, was designed for recruitment as much as for luxury and comfort—a collection of unnecessary features, like thumbprint scanners for door locks and sliding doors that opened vertically, had no practical use beyond mesmerizing the teenage minds wandering through those doors as undeclared recruits.
Soon after Harrington’s graduation, Frohnmayer realized that the necessity of winning college football’s financial arms race outweighed the convenience of denying it. The University of Oregon’s president knew it was an unsustainable system, but nevertheless he formed an intercollegiate athletics committee, stacked it with administrators and faculty who were friendly to athletics, and tasked it with helping “dispel some prevalent misinformation about the university’s athletics program.”
In reality, it was not misinformation but criticism that the committee sought to dampen.
“The ‘arms race’ and how to maintain competitiveness in athletics without compromising academics are issues of concern at the UO and nationally,” administrator Dan Williams wrote in one committee memo. “Locally, the symbolism of the new arena project and the remodeled locker room will likely instigate discussions about the role of athletics in academics.”
Many faculty members remained skeptical of a report issued by a university task force on intercollegiate athletics, which glossed over the deep-rooted problems unearthed by an earlier independent report which found that college athletics was increasingly commercialized, often to the detriment of an institution’s academic excellence and its broader student body.
In one October 2003 meeting, the committee ignored legitimate grievances, such as graduation rates and conflicts of interest, in favor of discussing how better to win critical faculty members over. Chemistry professor Jim Hutchison expressed confusion as to why other departments did not emulate athletics.
“It’s difficult to understand why some faculty members do not view the athletic department’s innovation and success as positive for the university and something to aspire to by all departments on campus,” Hutchison said.
The university’s shift toward athletics had not diminished its academic reputation, the committee claimed, offering as evidence the fact that Moos had accepted the job in part because of Oregon’s academic excellence. And because the athletics program was now its own self-sufficient entity, it could not possibly be a drain on other departments, Williams said. There was, however, a catch.
The department had exhausted the reserves it needed to continue building and renovating facilities, Williams said, and some donations for projects would be spread out over a few years, requiring the use of reserve funds to pay for projects during the building process. It would take years to build up the department’s reserves.
On the field, Bellotti was making this more difficult. Following the victory over Michigan, the Ducks lost three consecutive games, including a home-game blowout loss to Washington State. Later in the season, Neuheisel’s Huskies dealt the Ducks another loss before the team ended its season with a narrow defeat at the Sun Bowl.
“Hopefully,” Clemens said, “we’ll be known for our play pretty soon.”
Near the end of 2004, as college football’s regular season drew to a close, Jim McVay found himself explaining why new money was every bit as good as old money—something that was beneath the organizers of the Rose Bowl and the Sugar Bowl, but often necessary for the man in charge of a football game named after Outback Steakhouse.
“There are twenty-eight bowls, and people claw and scratch to distinguish themselves,” McVay said. “We’ve worked hard, had good community involvement and positioned ourselves as one of the top six bowl games in the country in terms of the teams we select and what we pay.”
The Outback Bowl, which pinned its fortunes on its title sponsor in 1995, would pay out $2.75 million each to Wisconsin and Georgia in 2004—significantly less than the $11–$14 million earned by teams competing in the four games comprising college football’s Bowl Championship Series (BCS): the Rose Bowl, the Orange Bowl, the Fiesta Bowl, and the Sugar Bowl. But the bevy of smaller, corporate Bowl games still offered a big payday for the American universities that lacked the kind of college football firepower provided by billionaire boosters like Knight and T. Boone Pickens, who was trying to do for Oklahoma football what Knight had accomplished in Oregon.
Pickens began his career as a geologist for Phillips Petroleum in 1951, shortly after graduating from Oklahoma A&M University. The oil business was in his blood: his father had worked for Phillips before him, and had traveled the Texas panhandle as a roughneck, a fireman, and a refinery worker. Pickens had inherited his father’s independent streak, and soon found himself chafing at the bureaucracy that surrounded him at Phillips, which was then one of the twenty largest corporations in America. In 1954, at the age of twenty-six, he quit the company and struck out on his own as an independent geologist. Two years later, he founded his first oil company, Petroleum Exploration Inc., along with two other investors. Ten years after he’d quit Phillips, Pickens brought his young company public under the new name Mesa Petroleum, and by 1968 it was bringing in more than $6 million annually. At forty years of age, Pickens was sitting on 62 billion cubic feet of natural gas reserves and millions of barrels of oil.
Pickens then acquired a bevy of companies like Hugoton, which controlled a significant portion of the largest natural gas field in the country, through corporate takeovers. Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, his escapades as a corporate raider turned his millions into hundreds of millions, but his biggest score came in 2003. At the age of seventy-five, the oil millionaire turned corporate raider used his Dallas-based hedge fund to bet on energy futures. When the price of oil and natural gas rose precipitously, as Pickens had guessed, his fund skyrocketed in value, rising to as much as $4 billion.
In 2001, Pickens went quail hunting with Mike Holder, OSU’s golf coach, who had raised tens of millions of dollars for the school’s athletics over the years. Holder suggested that Pickens consider donating $20 million toward a stadium renovation. The idea appealed to Pickens, who had grown tired of showing up to OSU football games only to see the Cowboys lose time and again.
“I don’t like that feeling,” he said.
In March 2003, Pickens began spending his newfound billions on his alma mater, starting with a $20 million contribution toward the $293-million renovation of Oklahoma State’s football stadium, which was renamed for the billionaire. In 2005, he hinted that he might be willing to give a considerably larger donation to the school if Holder would consider leaving his current job to take over for Harry Birdwell, who had announced he was retiring as the school’s athletic director. Holder was the least qualified of eight applicants, and he didn’t even really want the job. But Pickens made his wishes known to the hiring committee, and in the end, it was Holder who walked away with the position. A week after he took over as athletic director, he flew to Dallas and asked Pickens for $100 million for further football stadium renovations, including ninety-nine new luxury boxes. He also asked for another $265 million for various practice facilities and stadiums for sports other than football. Eventually, Pickens agreed to give the school’s athletic department $165 million—a gift that appreciated to more than $400 million after the university opted to reinvest the funds in BP Capital, the hedge-fund owned by Pickens.
A 2006 headline in The Oklahoman newspaper succinctly captured the dynamic at work: “Nike founder Phil Knight has helped build Oregon athletics to a level that Oklahoma hopes to surpass.”
Pickens suffered big losses during the financial crisis, but that didn’t keep him from pledging another $220 million to his alma mater, and before the economic downturn came to an end, the billionaire’s money was leaving its mark on the Stillwater, Oklahoma, campus. In 2010, the Cowboys won eleven games in a season for the first time in the school’s history. The next year, the team finished its season ranked third in the nation after winning twelve games and securing victory in the Big 12 Conference championship. The winning season Pickens had long dreamed of was capped with a win over Stanford in the Fiesta Bowl, and the once laughable football program was producing future NFL players by the dozen. Season ticket sales had risen to nearly 50,000, and student enrollment was up by 44 percent since the stadium renovation bankrolled by Pickens. But that didn’t tell the whole story.
When the financial crisis wiped billions of dollars from the value of the hedge fund Pickens managed, the billionaire stalled an unfinished project to develop a massive athletics village for the university—a project for which the state had used its powers of eminent domain to secure eighty-seven properties, some of which were wrested from their owners using the force of the courts. The holdouts were forced to vacate less than a year before the financial crisis stopped the project in its tracks, leaving the land in limbo. There was suddenly a sense that the community was paying for the university’s willingness to give Pickens whatever he wanted.
“The administration didn’t seem to care about the overall good of the community,” said OSU alumnus Garrett Hellman. “They pandered to whatever Boone wanted.”
Knight’s influence on the college football arms race seemed to grow exponentially, both by inspiring rival billionaires to take up the cause, and by elevating competition to the degree that it attracted increasingly lucrative television contracts and corporate Bowl sponsors. Twenty of twenty-eight Bowl games were picked up for broadcast by ESPN and ESPN2, which earned its biggest ratings of the year from the Bowl season and doled out broadcast fees accordingly. In 2003, ESPN paid $2.1 million for the rights to broadcast the Outback Bowl, while ABC paid a whopping $26 million for the rights to air the Rose Bowl.
The BCS system was created in 1998, when the six most powerful Division I conferences agreed on a structure that guaranteed the champion from each league would have an opportunity to play in one of the four most lucrative postseason Bowl games, leaving two at-large berths. Complex and unwieldy, with none of the simple elegance of a unified championship system like the one used in the NFL, the BCS instead relies on the overwhelming sense of history and tradition surrounding its four oldest bowl games—a sense that was soon undermined by a cash-grab culture that produced copious new Bowl games, with new corporate sponsors, backed by new money.
As chair of the Pac-10 conference CEO group, Frohnmayer was well aware of a growing backlash against the BCS system, which threatened to impede negotiations for a new television contract to replace the one that would expire after the 2006 Bowl games aired. The leader of the rebellion was Tulane president Scott Cowen, who represented a growing number of smaller colleges who argued that the BCS system benefitted big-money football powerhouses like Oregon, Nebraska, and Penn State, while shutting smaller schools out of contention for a national championship, which then put them at a disadvantage when it was time to recruit new athletes. In 1998, for example, Tulane had been shut out of the national championship Bowl games because of its low ranking in polls, despite its 11–0 record. The BCS contract also put smaller schools at a financial disadvantage, generating a total of $900 million to be divided among the big conferences, like Oregon’s Pac-10, with just $42 million left over for the smaller conferences to share.
Backed by a coalition of forty-four university presidents, Cowen threatened to bring an antitrust lawsuit against the BCS system if smaller colleges weren’t brought into the fold.
“Our preference,” Cowen said, “is that the BCS would go away completely.”
Harvey Perlman, who served as chancellor of the University of Nebraska, wrote to Frohnmayer on February 16, 2004, warning him of the dire situation developing as Cowen’s coalition gained strength.
Unless they were prepared to do whatever was necessary to significantly increase the BCS income and give a larger share to the coalition, Perlman wrote, then they might as well “face up to the reality that no agreement is possible.”
When Phil Knight stepped down from his role as Nike’s CEO in November 2004, a spokesman for the company joked with reporters about the possibility that he might spend his retirement coaching the University of Oregon football team. Knight retained his post as chairman of the board at Nike, which would keep him tethered to the company he’d cofounded and built. And while Frohnmayer hoped Knight would remain tethered to his alma mater as well, the university president’s statement at the time was tinged with a sense of desperate uncertainty.
“Phil has been intensively involved with the school for years,” Frohnmayer said. “We hope and expect to enjoy a continuing good relationship with Nike and Phil and Penny Knight.”
The source of Frohnmayer’s uncertainty was simple: Knight wasn’t getting what he wanted. For one thing, Oregon’s football team was in the midst of a disappointing backslide that would leave it with a dismal 5–6 record by the end of the season. More worrying still was the fact that Knight was ready to help build a new basketball arena for the school, and Frohnmayer hadn’t been able to secure the piece of real estate where the billionaire wanted to put it. On November 22, less than a week after Knight stepped down as Nike’s CEO, the two men talked about it on the phone.
The problem, Frohnmayer explained, was that the land was unattainable: Williams Bakery had been in operation at the edge of campus, a stone’s throw away from the Willamette River, since 1908; the owners had no interest in selling. Knight was unmoved, and uninterested in compromise. He told Frohnmayer to pursue the bakery site anyhow.
Later that day, Frohnmayer sent Knight a fax to make sure the Nike billionaire knew he’d gotten the message. He would pursue the site, he wrote, regardless of the obstacles standing in the way.
While Frohnmayer was busy doing his best to please Knight and to negotiate a lucrative new BCS contract, Bellotti was barely hanging on. Oregon’s head coach had decided in 2005 to shake things up by changing to a no-huddle “spread offense,” using three-, four-, or five-receiver sets to force the opposing defense to spread out. He’d had only sporadic success, however, and his team struggled to adapt to the faster pace of the new playbook. Desperate for a fix, Bellotti turned to a new offensive coordinator named Chip Kelly, who was building a reputation as a man religiously devoted to the kind of up-tempo offense Oregon was after.
“When we started this offense, we could figure out after the game what we should have done,” Bellotti said. “We progressed to the point where we could figure it out during the game. When I interviewed Chip, I realized he was the guy who would know, going into the game, what we should do.”
Kelly, who was in his forties, had grown up in New England, where he spent winters playing hockey and summers surfing off the coast of Maine. He’d graduated from the University of New Hampshire, where he was working as an assistant coach when Bellotti tapped him for the offensive coordinator job in Oregon. His résumé also included stints at Columbia and Johns Hopkins—the kind of schools where administrators were pleased if the football team won any games at all. And yet he’d managed to cultivate offenses that would lead football fans to call him a guru and a genius, often enough that he had a reflexive, self-deprecating reply: “Jonas Salk was a genius.”
Oregon’s offense clicked as soon as Kelly arrived in Eugene, and in his first year as offensive coordinator, in 2007, the Ducks improved to a 9–4 record. Bellotti credited Kelly’s spread offense with elevating Oregon “to the level where we were not the ones having to make adjustments; we were dictating to other teams.”
The following year, Syracuse wanted to hire Kelly as its new head coach, and Bellotti could see that his offensive coordinator was eager to step up. So he and Frohnmayer decided to make Kelly the coach-in-waiting. In 2008, Bellotti ended his college football coaching career with a respectable 10–3 season that owed as much to freshman quarterback Jeremiah Masoli as it did to Kelly. In 2009, when Kelly took over as head coach, Bellotti became the school’s new athletic director. He knew Frohnmayer would be retiring soon, and he was worried about what the new president’s attitude toward athletics might be.
“I could do the best job protecting the football program by going into the athletic director’s chair,” he said.
On paper, most of Kelly’s first season looked very much like Bellotti’s final season, with a 10–3 record, but there was more happening on the field than these numbers reflect. Oregon’s defensive line, which had been stocked with richer talent in 2008, managed to do more with less under Kelly’s leadership. Behind this was a heightened emphasis on Kelly’s favorite weapon: speed.
During practice, Kelly had his team “hitting the sled until they’re blue in the face,” according to defensive coordinator Nick Aliotti.
Under Kelly’s tutelage, his team sometimes ran thirty plays during just twelve minutes of practice drilling—fast enough that Aliotti sometimes had trouble getting the call out of his mouth before the ball was in play. The new system worked: with help from Masoli’s arm, Kelly led the Ducks to the Rose Bowl during his first season as head coach.
Just weeks into the 2010 football season, a peculiar new ritual had sprung from the fruits of Kelly’s relentless drilling and his intense emphasis on speed: the crowds at Autzen Stadium, long known for the cacophony of sound they created, could often be heard booing after the Ducks moved the ball downfield for a first down. The focus of their ire were the officials, who never quite managed to move the line of scrimmage quickly enough for Oregon fans, who would accuse them of slowing the tempo of the game in order to give the opposing team enough time to catch its breath.
“Some people call it a no-huddle offense,” said offensive lineman Mark Asper. “But I call it a no-breathing offense.”
On the sidelines, Kelly would wait out these pauses in a crouch, with his hands on his knees, like a baseball catcher rising to block a wild pitch. He had more patience than most college football coaches, and never seemed to panic when his team took time to find its rhythm. Under Kelly, the Ducks often failed to take the lead early, but week after week, teams great and small fell to Oregon after succumbing to the lung-bursting workout Kelly’s team forced on them.
“It’s still football,” Asper said of his team’s game. “We hit people. But after a while, the guys on the other side of the line are so gassed that you don’t have to hit them very hard to make them fall over.”
Once, Asper said, a player from Tennessee told him he was going to throw up if the pace of the game didn’t come down. Sometimes he explained that he had no choice but to keep following his coach’s instructions. Other times, he got inside his opponent’s head by warning them that the tempo was only going to get more difficult as the game went on.
During practice, Kelly put his team through the paces in the cavernous indoor training facility his predecessor had convinced Knight to build. With the 2010 season nearing its end, the Ducks remained undefeated, with ten wins, making it easy to imagine that the Moshofsky Center had been built for just such a moment in Oregon football history.
With loud rap music draining into the massive indoor practice space from two giant speakers attached to the ceiling, Kelly shouted at players who fell behind the tempo.
Kelly liked using music to energize his players, and to distract them from the blistering speed of his practices, where plays were executed even more quickly than they could be during a real game, when officials helped temper the brutal pace. It was an unreal scene for most football players, and for most athletes, who are used to being slowed down in practice—from Little League to ballet, practice is a time for taps on the shoulder and brief chats about posture, technique, and patience. But for Kelly, practice was a chance to go faster than one can manage in competition, and to drill into his athletes the ability to read his signals and execute his plays more quickly than any other team executing a spread offense. His players, young and eager, adapted to Kelly’s rituals easily, but it was mentally taxing for veterans like Aliotti, who had far more coaching experience than his boss, including a stint in the NFL.
Off the field, Kelly was much the same as he was on the field: all about football. Few people at Oregon would claim to have really known Chip Kelly, and those who did would tell you that he rarely talked about anything other than the game. Which was just fine with everyone in Eugene, so long as he kept on winning. Earlier in the season, he signed a contract extension that would pay him as much as $20.5 million through 2015, but he preferred not to justify his massive salary with the kind of bluster most college football coaches relied on. Most of his job, he would say, boiled down to watching his players on film, coming up with game plans, and pushing his team as far as he could in training. The goal, Kelly said, was “to bombard our kids.”
Off the field, Kelly’s kids were being bombarded with unwanted media attention. Masoli, who led the Ducks to the Rose Bowl in 2009, seemed set to compete for the Heisman Trophy in 2010, but instead left the team in disgrace after pleading guilty to burglary for stealing a laptop. Off the field, Oregon’s attorney general, John Kroger, investigated procedural irregularities in the $2.3-million buyout awarded to Bellotti when he left his coaching job to become the school’s athletic director. Bellotti’s replacement would need to find a way to make the bond payments that would soon come due for the school’s new basketball arena, which was going to cost the school $227 million. Nathan Tublitz was flabbergasted as to why the school continued to build expensive athletic facilities even without Knight’s backing; the athletic department, which had prided itself on being self-sufficient, seemed unable to stop itself from creating more buildings, each of them resting on foundations thick with debt.
“It’s time for the athletic department to do a little soul searching on how they can serve the university,” Tublitz said. “The athletic department is out of control here.”
Well before the start of the 2010 season, Kelly gathered his players to address a spate of arrests related to the program. He laid out the kind of behavior he expected from his team, and asked them to do better. The very next day, he learned that linebacker Kiko Alonso had been arrested for driving under the influence. Kelly dismissed Alonso and Masoli, as well as Jamere Holland, who had lashed out at his coach on Facebook.
“It happens everywhere, it happens in every sport,” Kelly said. “The problem is we’re a high-profile sport and we live in a fish bowl, so people know about it.”
Near the end of that same year, Kelly’s team was unbeaten and ranked number one in the nation, with an average of 50.7 points scored over the course of ten games. Many of the teams they bested lost to Oregon by nearly five touchdowns. New Mexico lost to the Ducks 72–0, and UCLA scored just thirteen points to Oregon’s sixty. Oregon’s offense, some argued, would do more than earn the team a championship—under Kelly’s leadership, this team would change how the game of football was played for years to come.
“Nobody in the whole history of football can snap off plays as quickly as this team does,” said former NFL pro Brian Baldinger. “Other teams can’t condition for it. It’s a great equalizer—if you’ve got a 350-pound guy, I don’t care how good he is, you’ve got to get him off the field. He can’t keep up.”
Oregon’s focus on conditioning, and its studious devotion to a secretive, opaque system of communicating plays using flash cards, put it on another level. In the final weeks of the regular season, Kelly’s team maintained its number-one ranking by toppling Arizona at Autzen Stadium, then plowing through cross-state rivals Oregon State at the annual Civil War game. A month later, on January 10, Kelly’s team did the one thing they hadn’t done all season: in the BCS national championship game, up against number-two-ranked Auburn, Oregon lost.
In early 2005, the property Knight wanted for the university’s new basketball arena finally became available. It was going to cost the school $22.2 million, which was not an ideal starting point for a project that was supposed to cost $100 million in total. This, too, became a point of contention for Knight, who wanted a much more expensive arena and didn’t want to pay for it himself—especially after he began butting heads with Moos that same year. Frustrated, he did the one thing that had always gotten him a free lunch in the past: he left his wallet at home.
While trying to appease Knight, Frohnmayer once again turned to a state bond initiative to fund a University of Oregon building project. This time the school was asking for $227 million worth of bonds, which the legislature approved on the condition that the project would eventually be paid for by private donors and the athletic department, rather than taxpayer funds or tuition dollars. And to make sure that happened, Frohnmayer would need to make Knight happy enough to pay his share.