One morning in 1995, before he had met most of his new colleagues at the University of Oregon, the school’s new athletic director, Bill Moos, traveled to Nike’s Beaverton headquarters for a meeting with Phil Knight. Moos, who had been on the job just two days, figured there was nothing he could say about the program that Knight didn’t already know, especially in the brief fifteen-minute slot he’d been promised. So he told the Nike cofounder a story instead.
In 1972, while Moos was a senior offensive tackle for Washington State, a pair of shoe promoters approached him and a teammate with a stack of orange shoe boxes with check marks on the side.
“Will you wear our shoes?” they asked the players.
“We’d wear anybody’s shoes,” Moos told the men.
He was given two pairs of Nike shoes, one for practice and one for games, and he told Knight he’d kept them for twenty years.
“That was our very first shoe,” Knight said.
The two men talked for ninety minutes that day, laying the foundation for twelve years of productive collaboration. The school’s athletics budget swelled from $18 million to $41 million during Moos’s tenure, which was characterized by audacious marketing campaigns, like the Joey Heisman billboard, and a building spree that left the campus stippled with new athletic centers and renovated stadiums. In his first year, the school’s football team sold 14,000 season tickets; in 2006, which would be his last season, they sold 41,000.
In all those years, Moos had just one significant disagreement with Knight, who wanted him to fire the University of Oregon’s track and field coach, Martin Smith. Moos refused, so Knight told Frohnmayer he would not contribute to the construction of the school’s new basketball arena until both men were gone. Coach Smith was forced out late in 2005, and Moos retired a little more than a year later and moved to a cattle ranch in Valleyford, Washington.
“I guess I’m at a point in my life where I’d rather step in it than put up with it,” Moos said.
Knight wanted his friend Pat Kilkenny to take over for Moos, who had been the most successful athletic director in Oregon history. Kilkenny was an unusual candidate for the job. While Moos had made a long career as an athletic director, Kilkenny was a former insurance executive whose only ties to college athletics were as a booster. Over the years, Kilkenny had given millions of dollars to the University of Oregon, and when Moos agreed to leave in early 2007, it was his prospective replacement, Kilkenny, who paid the $2-million severance package for the athletic director he was forcing out.
“I created the monster that ate me,” Moos said.
When Knight helped build the Moshofsky Center, near the end of the 1990s, the goal had been to transform Oregon’s football team into perennial contenders. Several years later, his renovation of Autzen Stadium gave the school’s blossoming athletic department the tools to bring in more cash through ticket sales and alumni fundraising. Matthew Knight Arena, which was unveiled in 2008, gave the University of Oregon a chance to raise the level of its basketball squad by using the $227-million court to attract better talent; with Moos and Smith gone, Knight pledged $100 million to help repay the bonds that secured construction costs for the world-class arena, which memorialized his late son, who had died at the age of thirty-four while scuba diving in El Salvador.
In 2009, with the arena project behind him, Dave Frohnmayer retired as president of the University of Oregon, after learning—but not revealing—that he was seriously ill. Dr. Richard Lariviere took over for Frohnmayer amid the political fallout of the contentious arena project and faced additional distractions from the controversy surrounding Kelly’s troubled football players. Early in his tenure, he was forced to shift his focus from raising the salaries of Oregon’s professors, which still lagged behind the national average, to managing one “unacceptable” sports scandal after another.
He began by cleaning house: Bellotti, who was tarnished by Kroger’s investigation over his golden parachute, was out. He also got rid of Melinda Grier, who had come to symbolize the veil of secrecy that surrounded so much of what went on at the university. It was Grier, for example, who had helped Frohnmayer maneuver the school out of its agreement with the WRC. During her years as general counsel, she had earned a reputation as a fixer for the fiefdom jointly operated by Nike and Oregon’s athletic department, according to Nathan Tublitz; the school’s office of public records was founded, in fact, because of Grier’s habit of preventing the release of public records, which were previously under her control. And it was Grier who the Oregonian wrote was responsible for “enforcing the culture of secrecy around Mike Bellotti’s $2.3 million compensation package.” Her contract, Lariviere said, would not be renewed when it expired in 2011.
This personnel shake-up was especially consequential in the wake of Frohnmayer’s retirement: over the years, Knight and Frohnmayer had developed a kind of shorthand—an unwritten contract between the two of them, forged through painful experience, that spelled out the rules that could be bent, the rules that could be broken, and, above all, what one man could expect from the other. With Frohnmayer and his general counsel gone, and Lariviere learning the ropes, there was a power vacuum that needed to be filled. The bureaucrats who stepped in to fill it were those people on campus who had the closest ties to Nike’s day-to-day operations on campus: a handful of key administrators and athletic department personnel, the new general counsel, and the leaders of the school’s public relations and marketing departments.
Lariviere, who was rarely seen without his signature brown fedora, had still bigger changes in mind for his tenure as the University of Oregon’s president. After decades of stagnation, it was time for Oregon’s flagship university to become independent from the state’s broader university system.
“The demand for fresh thinking and new models has never been more urgent,” he said.
Lariviere’s model for the semiprivate university of the future was one of independence—not from the corrupting influence of industry, but from the constraints of its ties to the state government from which it had emerged and under which it had flourished for so many years.
While Oregon athletics was in the throes of the Chip Kelly years, Knight chose Eugene as the battlefield on which to win the arms race Nike had helped ignite in college athletics. His closing volley began with an elegant three-story cube of glass and steel called the John E. Jaqua Academic Center for Student Athletes, which was unveiled in 2009 after Knight paid $42 million for its construction. Like all of his building projects, the 37,000-square-foot structure was built on land that Knight leased from the university until construction was completed. The academic center is perched in the middle of a shallow moat, with stone walkways leading to its glass façade, which makes it look like an Apple Store from which the tech company’s logo has ripened and fallen away. Inside, student-athletes can relax behind glass windows, made opaque by thin strips of brushed steel that hang across them like strands of tin spaghetti; they lounge on chairs and couches made from soft Italian leather that rest on white oak floors; glass elevators transport them to appointments with their own private tutors; and a café serves food and coffee to weary football and basketball players.
Situated amid a cluster of hundred-year-old dormitories and offices made from faded red brick, it’s easy to imagine that the incongruous Jaqua Center fell gently to earth after being made on some other planet. And for the ordinary students whose tuition dollars help sustain the academic center, it might as well be just that—the building, known around campus as “the jock box,” is off-limits to students who are not involved in Oregon athletics. The secrecy surrounding the jewel-like building has made it a monument to two different ways of thinking about the balance between athletic excellence and academic achievement: for boosters, it symbolizes Oregon’s commitment to educating its star athletes, whose burdens are eased by tutoring and support tailored to fit their unique needs; for skeptics, it is a feeble attempt to pretend its tutors are helping student-athletes, rather than cheating for them. It is also proof that the University of Oregon’s athletics department is not the independent machine it claims to be.
Like each of Knight’s gifts to the university, the Jaqua Center came with strings attached—staffing requirements calling for sixteen employees, and building maintenance costs amounting to $480,000 annually, much of which was drawn from the University of Oregon’s general fund. In the nine years before the luxurious academic center opened, Oregon’s athletic department quietly drew $8.5 million from the school’s general fund, which it used to pay tutoring and counseling costs for student-athletes. This served a dual purpose: it allowed administrators like Dan Williams to obscure the fact that Oregon’s athletic department was not, in reality, self-sufficient; and it forced ordinary students to subsidize athletic activities, even as tuition doubled and state support for higher education fell to just 7 percent of the school’s overall budget. By the time the Jaqua Center opened its doors, the annual cost of tutoring and counseling for Oregon’s student-athletes had swelled to $1.8 million.
This kind of creative accounting covered up a larger truth about college athletics, which was that it was rarely a profitable venture. On average, athletic departments in the NCAA’s top division received a subsidy of about $10 million from other corners of the university—only 14 out of 120 Division I athletic departments actually generated a profit. Like Williams before him, Kilkenny, who was then athletic director for the Ducks, falsely claimed that Oregon was among these profitable schools in a 2007 newspaper editorial.
“We receive no funding from the state or the university general funds,” Kilkenny wrote in Eugene’s Register-Guard.
In the summer of 2013, the ultimate expression of Nike’s alliance with the University of Oregon emerged with the opening of the $68-million Football Performance Center. The 145,000-square-foot facility was dizzyingly luxurious, even for Knight, who paid for its construction; no other college football program in the nation could dare to imagine such a facility, which was elegant beyond what most NFL teams could claim.
It was easy, strolling through the facility, to mistake it for many things that it was not: an art installation on the sixth-floor sky bridge gave the impression of a museum; a private barbershop, stocked with utensils from Milan and staffed with a private hairdresser for shaggy Ducks, seemed as though it belonged in a European spa; lockers outfitted with biometric scanners added a touch of Silicon Valley to the shower room. When the school first gave reporters a glimpse of the facility, late in July of 2013, the tour lasted three hours. And for the first time, athletic department staff like Jeff Hawkins embraced a nickname that had once been considered derisive.
“We are the University of Nike,” Hawkins said. “We embrace it. We tell that to our recruits.”
With Knight’s help, the University of Oregon was finally able to sell its recruits, and its fans, the one thing that could compete with the lure of tradition that had long sustained football programs at schools like Alabama and Notre Dame: what the Ducks were selling, better than any other team in football, was the future.
And, like the Jaqua Center, the Football Performance Center looked like it came from the future: granite, corrugated metal, and fritted glass, arranged into massive structures that suggested an angular conceptual rendering of the Death Star. Its form suggested both the boundless imagination of its architects and the limitless resources of the man footing the bill; one of the architects traveled to China in search of the rock quarry that produced the stones used in the ground-floor plaza. Such understated flourishes were accentuated by flashy toys that served as reminders of the building’s chief function, which was to lure young minds: Sony PlayStation consoles, custom-made in Oregon green, and pool tables made by a Portland company that had designed a pair for Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch. Other small touches were less ostentatious—elevators decorated with famous plays from Oregon’s history; extra-sturdy furniture made to withstand five hundred pounds; and shelves that charge any phone or tablet that is placed on them, without any outlets or cords.
Standard amenities, like the cafeteria, were taken to the next level with deluxe espresso machines and farm-to-table meals; training facilities were taken to outlandish extremes, with a forty-yard track surrounding the weight room, where video cameras recorded and measured the efficiency of each step that fell upon the Brazilian ipe-wood floors.
“It’s the densest wood known to mankind,” said Craig Pintens, an associate athletic director for the Ducks. “It doesn’t float, doesn’t burn—that makes it ideal for a weight room.”
For recovery, there were hydrotherapy pools and steam showers, and for hygiene there were deep sinks sitting in front of mirrors fitted with built-in televisions. Oregon athletic director Rob Mullens, in a feat of understatement, called it “probably the most complete space in college sports.” More than that, it was the most complete weapon the college football arms race had ever seen—a game-changer.
On September 3, 2011, the head of Oregon’s State Board of Higher Education, Matt Donegan, was packing his suitcase for a flight when he received a distressing phone call. University of Oregon president Richard Lariviere, who he was about to meet at a Ducks game against LSU, had escalated his rebellion against the rest of the OUS, and it was going to cost the state’s six other schools money—unless he was stopped.
Since taking over for Frohnmayer two years earlier, Lariviere had become a beloved figure on campus. He was plainspoken, despite holding a doctorate in Sanskrit, and remained a fierce advocate of the brand of affordable public education that had allowed him to become the first member of his Iowa family to attend college.
“I owe everything I have to the remarkable power of education,” he said.
In Eugene, Lariviere had shown his willingness to embrace change by throwing out Frohnmayer’s fixer, Melinda Grier, but he also made clear his willingness to accept those things he could not change. He met with Knight soon after arriving on campus, and traveled occasionally to meet the billionaire at Nike’s Beaverton headquarters. The two men spoke on the phone regularly, and Lariviere put great stock in Knight’s opinions, which he found to be “realistic and hard-eyed.” He was no pushover, though, as his treatment of Grier had shown—he knew that athletics paid the bills at Oregon, but he was unwilling to let the tail wag the dog.
“I’m very grateful that we have that vehicle to get our name and our mission out,” he said. “But it’s entertainment, it’s not education. It’s not research. It’s not pedagogy. It’s entertainment.”
When Oregon’s attorney general asked why Mike Bellotti had received a $2.3-million buyout that was not written into his coaching contract, Lariviere did not hesitate before firing the beloved athletic director. And while he was prone to explaining away the athletic department’s follies and misdemeanors, he was refreshingly curt when discussing his criticisms.
The University of Oregon’s athletic department “ha[s] had sloppy business practices—an immature, amateurish way of running this business,” Lariviere said. “I understand why that happened, because they got out of bed one morning and they were a $70-million-a-year business.”
Above all, Lariviere was beloved around Eugene for his bold vision, which took Frohnmayer’s ideas about outside funding a step further. A year into his tenure as the University of Oregon’s president, Lariviere approached Oregon’s legislature with a bold new plan for funding higher education at the state’s flagship university: if Oregon would agree to issue $800 million worth of thirty-year bonds for the university, while furnishing the school with the $64.5 million necessary for servicing the annual debt on those bonds, the school would invest the full $800 million, along with privately raised funds, and use the cash to operate independently. The university would have greater independence from the OUS, while the state would contribute less money, overall, to the annual operating budget of the school. Timing was key, Lariviere felt, because the financial crisis had created some of the most favorable rates they were likely to see for some time.
Lariviere’s plan earned the ire of the Oregon State Board of Higher Education, which would have to cede its influence over the University of Oregon to an independent governing board in order for the plan to succeed. George Pernsteiner, who oversaw the OUS, asked Lariviere to wait on his plan until the board finished its lengthy, contentious negotiations with the unions representing clerical and support staff at Oregon’s seven universities. Governor Kitzhaber echoed Persteiner’s request, and asked Lariviere not to increase any wages at the University of Oregon until the contract negotiations were settled with the unions. The University of Oregon president ignored both men.
In the midst of the contentious union negotiations, Lariviere spent nearly $5 million on long-overdue raises for more than 1,100 faculty and administrators at his school. This enraged Governor Kitzhaber, who complained that the University of Oregon president had “disregarded my specific direction on holding tight and delaying discussion about retention and equity pay increases until the next biennium to allow for a consistent, system-side policy on salaries.” With its bargaining position weakened, the OUS conceded $10 million more than it hoped to in annual raises and benefits for union clerical and support staff at the state’s other six universities.
In September of 2011, when Donegan picked up the phone and learned about Lariviere’s pay increases, he confronted the University of Oregon president, who surprised him with his reply: he was going to do what was best for the University of Oregon, which he felt had been held back for the past thirty years.
“At that point, I realized this is a gravely serious matter,” Donegan said, calling Lariviere’s actions “insubordination that would never be tolerated in the private sector.”
A few months later, on a Monday afternoon in late November, the OUS board voted to terminate Lariviere’s contract. Pernsteiner, who was booed loudly when he recommended the motion, returned home to find his house had been pelted with eggs and spray-painted with graffiti that spelled out the reason behind the vandalism with a reference to Lariviere’s signature accessory: “The Hat.”
Knight had been a supporter of Lariviere’s vision for a more private kind of public university—the kind of school that could operate more or less as it wished, with minimal oversight from state institutions, and minimal friction to slow the gears of industry as they chewed through the valuable infrastructure of a once-public institution. Freed from the bureaucracy of the state’s broader university system, Oregon might have transformed its nickname into its reality: the University of Nike. Instead, Michael Gottfredson took over as president of the school, and Knight retained his position as the most powerful man behind the scenes. On the other side of the country, at the University of Connecticut, a different kind of booster was straying from the template of quiet, calm control that Knight had come to exemplify in Oregon.
Robert Burton grew up in Kentucky’s coal country, where he escaped a life in the mines because of a football scholarship that allowed him to go to college at Murray State University. After earning a degree in business administration in 1962, he was drafted into the NFL by the San Francisco 49ers, and later played for the Buffalo Bills. When his modest professional football career ended, Burton made a fortune as an executive in the printing and publishing industries. In 2011, the seventy-two-year-old was managing his own private equity firm while donating small chunks of his wealth to the University of Connecticut’s football program—$7 million, in total, by the time his relationship with the school began to sour.
In a letter to the school’s athletic director, Jeff Hathaway, Burton demanded that the school return a $3-million donation and remove his name from a football complex built with his money. The reason, Burton said, was that he was not consulted about the hiring of the school’s new head coach, Paul Pasqualoni, who the millionaire had disliked since he’d coached his son at Syracuse years earlier.
“You are not qualified to be a Division I A.D. and I would have fired you a long time ago,” Burton wrote. “You do not have the skills to cultivate new donors.”
The school’s interim president, Philip Austin, struggled to mend fences with Burton, who had been the biggest financial supporter of its sports programs. Seeking insights, The New York Times turned to Jim Earl, who warned about what might happen in Connecticut if the school’s president acquiesced to Burton’s wishes, as Frohnmayer had done over the WRC.
“In the university,” Earl said, “a general rule is that your money does not win you influence. When word gets out that the donor is pulling this string, it’s a scandal.”
It was too late for Oregon, he felt, but other schools had the opportunity to look at the University of Nike as a cautionary tale rather than a road map for funding higher education.
“We’re so deep in this that we can never go back,” Earl said. “A professor can only do so much, and money talks. Phil Knight is a major donor. You really don’t want to get in his way or cross him. It does not take much to get him to walk away.”
The only way to stop America’s public universities from becoming mere instruments of corporate raiders, he said, was to eliminate tax breaks for contributions to intercollegiate athletics. Earl had seen the fruits of the devil’s bargain firsthand, and he’d learned that they were not worth the costs.
“Do you think our university is getting better?” Earl asked. “The world thinks of us as a sports franchise. They don’t care what we do on the other side of campus. The team is owned by an institution that is flat broke,” he said, referring to the University of Oregon Foundation. “And a football game isn’t helping at all.”
After leaving Eugene, Bill Moos spent three years raising angus cattle on his ranch in Valleyford, Washington, earning $200,000 a year from the ten-year non-compete clause he’d signed with Oregon. It was a quiet, restful existence that came to an end in late February of 2010, when the president of Washington State University called Moos and asked him to leave his non-compete payments behind and take over as athletic director at his alma mater—an irresistible challenge for the man who had helped bring Oregon to the upper echelon of the Pac-10 conference, in which Washington State athletics ranked lowest in terms of its operating budget.
The timing proved to be fortuitous. A year after Moos took over at Washington State, the conference had added Colorado and Utah to become the Pac-12, and its coffers were swollen with cash after signing a twelve-year $3-billion broadcast agreement with ESPN and Fox. Washington State’s share of the conference television rights soared from $3.7 million to $14.7 million, bringing its total conference revenue to $17.8 million—more than double what it had been before Moos arrived.
Soon Moos was overseeing $130 million worth of building projects, including a renovation of Martin Stadium, which grew by 89,000 square feet, gaining 42 luxury boxes and 23 luxury suites reserved for boosters. In the spring of 2013, he unveiled a new 84,000-square-foot building that acted as the nerve center for Washington State’s football operations, which were led by head coach Mike Leach, who Moos had lured with a $2.25 million annual contract—four times what his predecessor had earned for coaching the Cougars.
Washington State was not alone—schools throughout the Pac-12 conference had embarked on a $1-billion building spree in the wake of the new television contract, which guaranteed massive yearly payouts and increased national exposure, with the number of televised conference events rising from 550 to 750 per year.
Stanford expanded its football complex and its field hockey venue, and poured money into infrastructure upgrades that would give television broadcasters easier access to more parts of the school’s sports venues. Utah saw its television revenue grow from $2 million to $8 million in its first year as part of the Pac-12 conference, and immediately put the money toward paying off a new $32-million football center. Colorado’s athletic department, while saddled with $22 million in debt, sought to finance a new indoor practice facility to replace its flood-damaged athletic center. At the University of Washington, athletic director Scott Woodward thought of just one thing when he first learned how much money the Pac-12 television deal would bring his school: the arms race against Oregon, in which th Ducks had gained the upper hand thanks to Phil Knight.
“It’s obvious the resources have helped them,” Woodward said. “Phil Knight’s a brilliant guy, and he understood that money matters.”
The new television contract, Woodward said, was a chance for the Pac-12 to catch up with the Big Ten and the Southeastern Conference (SEC). But it was also an opportunity for the Huskies, and other Pac-12 teams, to catch up with Oregon. Each year, Washington would go $3 million into debt on capital projects that included a $15-million baseball stadium, a new basketball operations facility, and upgraded facilities for Olympic sports. Athletic department staff got raises and teams got generous new travel budgets, while the football stadium, perched beside Lake Washington, underwent a $280-million renovation.
“We had to play catch-up,” Woodward said. “We had to invest. It’s going to take a good decade to do that.”
In the summer of 2009, there were few college football prospects hotter than running back Lache Seastrunk, who had made a name for himself playing high school ball in Temple, Texas. He was fast and agile, with snappy acceleration and an ability to change direction without losing speed; his nimble footwork made him a chore to defend, and his exceptional balance helped him break tackles that other players couldn’t—one scout reported seeing him recover and gain extra yards after a defender had him just about bent over backward. Lots of schools courted him, including California, USC, LSU, and Tennessee, the last of which flew Seastrunk and his mother to Knoxville for an unofficial visit less than a month after he’d graduated from high school. But none wanted him more than the University of Oregon, where Seastrunk’s tools made him the perfect player for Chip Kelly’s spread offense.
Seastrunk signed a letter of intent with the Ducks on February 3, 2010, and for years afterward the factors influencing that decision would be a matter of interest for NCAA investigators. At the center of the controversy was a Houston-based talent scout named Willie Lyles.
The month after Seastrunk and his mother flew to Knoxville, Tennessee’s assistant coach, Mack Garza, wired Lyles $1,500 to reimburse him for the money he’d spent on their airfare—a violation of NCAA rules. If Lyles had influenced Seastrunk’s decision to sign with Oregon, it would constitute another rule violation. Evidence suggested he may have done just that.
On March 24, 2010, the University of Oregon paid Lyles $25,000, which Chip Kelly said was for his scouting services. There was plenty for investigators to be suspicious about, however: talent scouts typically sent schools hours of highlight reels taken at games and practices, but the University of Oregon could produce no such video footage from Lyles. The payment, which came the month after Seastrunk signed, was much larger than the $16,500 Oregon had paid another Texas scouting company for two years of its services; and Seastrunk’s mother was surprised to learn that Lyles was a talent scout.
“Willie said he was a trainer,” Evelyn Seastrunk said. “Now Oregon says he’s a scout? Is he on Oregon’s payroll? If Willie collected $25,000 off my son, he needs to be held accountable. The NCAA must find out for me. I don’t know how to digest someone cashing in on my son.”
In the end, Seastrunk transferred to Baylor without ever playing a game for Oregon. But the Lyles controversy didn’t go away when he did.
LaMichael James rushed for 1,731 yards in 2010, and ran third in votes for the Heisman Trophy, but his fondest memory from his sophomore season involved dumping flour on his Oregon teammates while they slept. He loved the game, but he loved his teammates even more, because they made football feel like comedy rather than drama. His junior year would not be as blessed with levity and hijinks; Oregon football in 2011 was a nonstop drama.
The Ducks started the season with some unexpected holes in the team’s lineup, including one left by Cliff Harris, who had been suspended indefinitely for driving 118 miles per hour with a suspended driver’s license. And James himself, who remained a strong contender for the Heisman Trophy, was unexpectedly ensnared in the NCAA investigation into talent scout Willie Lyles, who he considered a trainer and advisor.
These dark clouds seemed to be hanging over the Ducks as the team lost its season opener to fourth-ranked LSU in a game plagued by turnovers. The following Saturday, however, James found his old form, scoring one touchdown after another in a 69–20 blowout over Nevada. Week after week, more rivals fell, with the exception of USC, which narrowly beat the Ducks in a late-November match. A late-season loss to the Trojans wasn’t enough to stop Oregon from winning the Pac-12 championship game against UCLA, giving the Ducks a third consecutive conference title. The pinnacle came later, on January 2, 2012, when the Ducks returned to the Rose Bowl.
The week before Oregon faced Wisconsin in Pasadena, Nike revealed the uniforms the Ducks would be wearing for the game. These ritual uniform unveilings had become a central part of the University of Nike experience, and the potential combinations of custom colors, designs, and helmets had led Nike to employ an algorithm to help decide what the Ducks would wear on any given Saturday; over the years, hundreds of sports columns had been dedicated to the head-turning looks, like the all-white Stormtrooper uniform, and a neon-yellow uniform that made the team look like highlighter pens. Once, the Ducks shocked college football fans by wearing non-team colors during a national championship game. Win or lose, the uniforms Nike made for the Ducks always got noticed. And that was precisely the point for Nike designer Tinker Hatfield, a trim, soft-spoken former pole-vaulter who did for Nike what Jony Ive would later do for Apple.
“What is a more visible way to turn up the heat and create a personality than through the football uniforms?” Hatfield said.
Some college football watchers went so far as to claim that the uniforms were a key part of Oregon’s rise as a football power.
“It all starts with the uniforms,” said Oregonian reporter Rachel Bachman.
For the 2012 Rose Bowl, the uniforms started with a reflective dark-silver-colored helmet that had been polished to a high sheen. Dark-green jerseys, accented with neon yellow, completed the look, which drew typically mixed reviews from football fans.
“I’m old school,” said Oregon running instructor Joe Henderson. “I still like the old green and yellow uniforms.”
One graphic designer called the look “a techy, cyborgy kind of thing.” The Ducks Store, which sits at the edge of the University of Oregon’s Eugene campus, was nevertheless deluged with phone calls from fans who wanted to buy the jerseys from the moment Nike announced them.
Wisconsin scored first, but Kelly was never bothered by playing from behind early in the game. He’d conditioned his team to win by attrition, and it only took a few minutes for the Ducks to storm their way downfield for a touchdown. The Badgers scored again to retake the lead near the end of the first quarter, but with just three seconds remaining on the clock, Oregon quarterback Darron Thomas handed the ball to De’Anthony Thomas, who ran it ninety-one yards for a touchdown. The man nicknamed the Black Mamba tore through Wisconsin’s formidable defense, showing off his explosive speed in the process. But his run also showcased how Kelly’s unique offense worked.
Most college football teams were using gap control, assigning each defender a space to fill between the opposing team’s offensive linemen. When they do this well, the defenders “spill” the other team’s offense to the outside, forcing runners to head for the edges of the field, where oncoming defenders are waiting for them. Wisconsin had all of Oregon’s gaps covered as the Rose Bowl’s first half wound to an end, but because Kelly had placed Thomas and Kenjon Barner in the backfield, the defense needed to account for the additional gaps these backs could create if a runner passed by either side of them. If Oregon had been running a traditional offense, they would have been well covered by the Badgers defense. But there was nothing traditional about Kelly’s plays.
Kelly called for quarterback Darron Thomas to read the backside linebacker—if he stayed put, Thomas would hand the ball off to a running back; if he moved back, the quarterback himself would take the ball outside; and if another defender threatened Thomas, he would have a second running back waiting behind him to take the ball. The backfield action caused Wisconsin’s defenders to head outside, leaving a massive gap for the Black Mamba to exploit when Thomas handed him the ball.
Throughout the first half, Wisconsin continued to retake the lead and Oregon continued to match them in dramatic fashion. In the second half, the relentless pace of Kelly’s spread offense began to take its toll on the Badgers, and the Ducks took the lead. But the Badgers seemed to come up with an answer for everything the Ducks threw at them.
With just over four minutes remaining in the game, Wisconsin’s Russell Wilson connected with Jared Abbrederis on a twenty-nine-yard play that brought the Badgers to Oregon’s twenty-seven-yard line. But the Ducks’ Terrance Mitchell punched the ball, which slipped loose and landed just inside the field of play, where Oregon’s Michael Clay picked it up. Oregon had a seven-point lead and they had possession of the ball. Minutes later, with the game ticking away, Wilson managed to get the ball back to Oregon’s twenty-five-yard line. But speed was not Wisconsin’s specialty, and when Wilson tried to stop the game clock at two seconds by spiking the ball, the referees said he’d acted too late—the clock had run out, and the game was over. Oregon had ended its seven-game losing streak in the Rose Bowl, which it had won just once before, in a 1917 victory over the University of Pennsylvania. In front of 91,245 fans, with the light of fireworks reflecting off their highly polished helmets, the Ducks celebrated the 45–38 victory over Wisconsin, which set a record as the highest-scoring Rose Bowl in history.
LaMichael James had played a huge role in Oregon’s win, with 25 carries and 159 yards, including a scintillating 15-yard drive to throw down a gauntlet, of sorts, after Wisconsin fans celebrated as Oregon guard Carson York was carried off the field with an injury. In 2011, James had rushed for a school-record 1,805 yards, and proved himself to be a perfect complement for Kelly’s unique zone-blocking scheme. Amid the celebrations, however, were lingering questions about the season to come. In the locker room, reporters wanted to know whether James was going to finish school as a Duck or leave early for the NFL draft.
“I really don’t know,” James told them. “This is the happiest I’ve ever been in my life, and I can’t put money in front of my happiness.”
Soon, however, James decided that the NFL was a safer bet than sticking it out in college, where he risked injuries that could lower his value as a professional player. When the San Francisco 49ers drafted him with the sixty-first pick of the 2012 NFL draft, messages of congratulations flooded into his phone faster than he could respond to them. At his draft-day party, James celebrated the start of his professional career with his friend Willie Lyles, who was still under investigation by the NCAA for selling high school recruits to teams like Oregon and LSU.
The Ducks were hardly slowed down by the loss of LaMichael James. Under Kelly’s leadership, the 2012 season unfolded much as the previous season had: for sixty thrilling minutes each Saturday, the Ducks used Kelly’s signature fast-tempo, no-huddle spread offense to obliterate rivals in spectacular fashion. While remaining undefeated through its first ten games of the season, Oregon chalked up an impressive list of statistics: fourth in the nation for rushing yards, second in total yards, and first in scoring, with an average of more than fifty-four points per game.
“We don’t run a gimmick deal,” Kelly said. “We run the ball. We throw the ball. We’re very balanced.”
One of the cornerstones of that balance was a nineteen-year-old freshman quarterback from Honolulu, Hawaii. Marcus Mariota impressed Kelly by throwing for 202 yards in his team’s spring training game to beat out veteran Bryan Bennett for the starting spot in summer camp. In his debut game, Mariota threw for 200 yards and three touchdowns. A week later, he racked up 260 yards and two more touchdowns against Arizona.
While Mariota executed Kelly’s frenetic playbook, his poise and calm sometimes made him appear to be moving in slow motion, even as he orchestrated attacks that chewed up the opposing team’s defense. He quickly became one of college football’s most efficient passers, with quick feet and a sharp release that gave him the time to choose his moment carefully. And like most good magicians, he claimed not to know the secret to his own tricks.
“I don’t know how it works,” he said of Kelly’s spread offense. “But it does.”
It worked, in part, because the six-foot-four quarterback had De’Anthony Thomas and Kenjon Barner, who could be relied on to do something just about anytime Mariota put the ball in their hands. Barner had taken an unlikely path toward developing the speed and agility that made him a star running back for the Ducks in 2012; after Kelly’s grueling practices, Barner would drive his Camaro across town for ballet lessons, which he credited for helping him achieve some of his more impressive statistics: five touchdowns in a single game; fourth in career kick returns at Oregon; and the first Duck since 1965 to score touchdowns while rushing, receiving, returning a punt, and returning a kickoff.
When his receivers couldn’t get open, Mariota had enough speed to move the ball downfield on his own, often enough that he was Oregon’s third-leading rusher after Barner and Thomas.
“When he gets in the open field, he just runs away from people,” said USC coach Lane Kiffin.
During a spring clinic in 2011, Kelly explained why he loved a quarterback like Mariota, who could run fast but did so less often than he probably could.
“I look for a quarterback who can run and not a running back who can throw,” he said. “We are not a Tim Tebow type of quarterback team. I am not going to run my quarterback 20 times on power runs.”
Like the previous season, the Ducks lost just one game, this time against Stanford, which managed to pull off the upset victory over Oregon in overtime. And for the fifth-straight season, the Ducks swept the Pac-12 and retained the conference title. In the Fiesta Bowl, they trampled Kansas State 35–17, and once again the locker-room celebrations were bittersweet. But this time it wasn’t a star player who was rumored to be leaving college football’s best team in the west—it was Chip Kelly.
In the two days after the Ducks won the Fiesta Bowl, Kelly interviewed with the Philadelphia Eagles, the Cleveland Browns, and the Buffalo Bills before announcing that he’d be staying at Oregon. Ten days later, in mid-January, he reversed course and decided to leave college football for an NFL job coaching the Eagles. In his four years at Oregon, Kelly’s Ducks had won forty-seven games and lost just seven times. Clouding his brilliant legacy, however, was the Willie Lyles scandal, which seemed to loom even over his decision to leave college football for the NFL. At Oregon, he was still subject to whatever penalties the NCAA might choose to impose on him if the investigation determined that he had violated the association’s rules about recruiting; with the Eagles, he could be sure that his livelihood would remain intact, even if his reputation did not.
“We’ve cooperated fully with them,” Kelly said of the NCAA investigators. “If they want to talk to us again, we’ll continue to cooperate fully. I feel confident in the situation.”
The week after Oregon fans learned that Kelly was leaving the Ducks for the Eagles, the NCAA finally meted out its punishment after a two-year investigation into the Lyles affair: Oregon would face a three-year reduction of one scholarship for its football program, and further reductions in scouting days and the number of paid visits the program was allowed to host—a slap on the wrist, considering that a Bowl ban had been on the table. The harshest punishment went to Chip Kelly, who faced an eighteen-month ban that would run its course while he was coaching in Philadelphia; many speculated that someone within the NCAA had forewarned Kelly about the sanction, leading him to suddenly reverse his decision to stay in Oregon.
Chip Kelly’s maverick turn as Oregon’s head football coach left an indelible mark on the team’s identity and its bottom line. Nike had been selling Oregon’s sizzle for so long that the steak sold itself once Kelly brought consistent, spectacular wins to the program. The results, in dollars and cents, couldn’t have been clearer: in the afterglow of the Kelly years, the University of Oregon’s licensing business exploded into the ranks of the top ten most popular college teams in terms of licensing royalties. Like Mickey Mouse or the Playboy bunny, the Oregon Ducks logo was capable of generating millions of dollars in revenue on its own.
One year after Kelly left the team, Oregon’s licensing royalties brought in nearly $5 million, four times what it had generated before the coach arrived in Eugene. Behind the increase was an unprecedented rise in the number of college football fans cheering the team on from outside Oregon. Part of the audacity of the Joey Heisman billboards was that, in 2001, Oregon was a regional team with outsized ambitions; the subtext of The New York Times op-eds on the billboard was that a regional team from the West Coast didn’t have any business advertising itself in New York City. A little more than a decade later, college sports fans in New York were buying more gear from the Ducks Store than people in almost every other state, with the exception of Oregon, California, Washington, and Texas.
“We’re fast becoming people’s second-favorite team,” said Ducks Store manager Arlyn Schaufler.
In Northern California, the Ducks are more popular than Stanford, and throughout the United States no other college team has fans as geographically widespread as Oregon. According to Facebook data, Oregon supporters account for more than 10 percent of all college football fans in more zip codes than any other team in America. And while Florida State won college football’s national championship in 2014, Oregon made $200,000 more than the Seminoles in merchandising royalties. Hatfield’s uniforms have also reaped less tangible benefits when it comes to recruiting talent. Kenjon Barner, for one, chose Oregon over other schools because one of his brothers liked the flashy uniforms.
Miraculously, sales of Nike products accounted for only one-third of these royalties, meaning that two-thirds was accounted for, in large part, by independent and local retailers. One screen-printing company in Springfield, Oregon, doubled its number of employees, from twenty-five to fifty, during the years Kelly was coaching the Ducks. When the company was founded, shortly after Knight committed to building the Moshofsky Center, the owner expected to eke out a humble profit selling iron-on patches. During the Kelly years, he had standing purchase orders worth six-figure sums ready to go whenever Oregon competed in a Rose Bowl or a championship game.
The University of Oregon, like Nike, had built a multimillion-dollar brand. And like Nike, it would face tough decisions about how far it was willing to go to protect that brand.