Everyone caught up to Oregon’s business model. Can Ducks win it all in a world they pioneered? – The New York Times

NCAAF
2025 College
Football Playoff
As last year's No. 1 seed and this year's top-ranked first-round host, Oregon has set itself up for CFP success. Tom Hauck / Getty Images
After decades of milestone wins on its climb to college football powerhouse status, Oregon found itself on the other side of a signature victory this season.
As Indiana celebrated on the Ducks’ home field on Oct. 11, an Oregon staffer shook the hand of a Hoosiers assistant coach and congratulated him on a 30-20 win that helped validate IU as a national championship contender.
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“We’re hard to beat,” the Oregon staffer said.
No doubt. Since joining the Big Ten last year, the Ducks are 17-1 in conference play and 24-2 overall, with a league title in their debut season. Since 2010, Oregon is tied for fifth in the nation in victories with Oklahoma at 161. Only Alabama, Ohio State, Clemson and Georgia have more.
“We’ve been building to a standard of what winning football looks like, regardless of conference,” head coach Dan Lanning said this week.
After the Ducks spent years breaking through barriers that previously required something akin to birthright status for entry, college football has met them where they are. Adaptability and innovation are cornerstones of the Oregon brand, so of course, no school was better prepared to succeed when NCAA amateurism crumbled and the ability to effectively pay players became a necessity for programs that aspire to win national championships.
Oregon football has never been better, but the Ducks are no longer college football’s gate-crashers.
“There’s been some great stories in college football, but it’s even harder to stay there, and (the Ducks) have found a way to stay there,” said Craig Pintens, who was a high-ranking administrator at Oregon from 2011 through ’18 before becoming athletic director at Loyola Marymount.
In this year’s College Football Playoff, Indiana, Texas Tech and Ole Miss are the new-money climbers, no longer constrained by their histories.
The Ducks? Heading into a first-round home game against 12th-seeded James Madison on Saturday, they are just another team trying to win a championship.
Well, maybe not just another team.
You see, Oregon is not quite a member of the establishment class, either. It has a lot more in common with Ohio State, Georgia, Oklahoma, Alabama and Miami these days than with the Hoosiers, Red Raiders and Rebels — with one notable exception.
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That first group has combined for 13 national titles since 2000 and 34 in college football’s poll era, dating to 1936.
The Ducks are still seeking their first.
“They’ve built the entire sundae at this point,” Pintens said. “It’s just a matter of putting that cherry on the top. And it is inevitable. It’s going to happen.”
College football has never cultivated upward mobility. Past success is the best predictor of future success. Lineage and tradition are prized commodities.
The schools at the top of the food chain tend to stay there — or have an easier time getting back when they slip. Those toward the bottom generally get stuck.
There are outliers. Nebraska looks as if it may never recreate the glory days of the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s. Clemson went from good to elite under Dabo Swinney, but that era of dominance is increasingly looking like a moment in time rather than a permanent change.
And then there’s Oregon, the most obvious exception that proves the rule.
The Ducks didn’t have USC’s Heritage Hall, a shrine to a program that claims 11 national titles and eight Heisman winners. They didn’t have Touchdown Jesus, Notre Dame’s iconic monument to the program’s essential place in the history of college football.
“We didn’t have the kinds of things that Ohio State and Texas and all these legacy programs had, but we did feel like we had a chance,” former Oregon athletic director Pat Kilkenny said.
The first baby step toward Oregon shedding its history came in Shreveport, La., of all places, with quarterback Bill Musgrave leading coach Rich Brooks’ Ducks to a victory in the program’s first postseason game in 26 years, the 1989 Independence Bowl against Tulsa.
The mid-1990s featured trips to the Rose and Cotton bowls that signaled progress but also showed the Ducks still had a long way to go: Oregon lost those games to Penn State and Colorado by a combined score of 76-26.
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Nike co-founder and Oregon alum Phil Knight’s involvement and investment in the program brought a grander vision in the early 2000s. Why not put up a billboard in Times Square to promote quarterback Joey Harrington as a Heisman Trophy contender in 2001?
“I think our optimism was more about Holiday Bowl and Top 25,” said Kilkenny, an Oregon native. “But somebody like Phil Knight gets involved, that doesn’t work for him. He doesn’t want to do anything unless he can be the best.”
Oregon football had no distinguishing characteristics, so Knight helped create them.
With Nike’s help, Oregon made uniforms a differentiator in recruiting, unveiling a fresh look almost weekly.
“Being fashion-progressive isn’t exactly indicative of a strong football program, but (Knight) saw it as brand-building,” Kilkenny said.
The Ducks were on the front end of the spread offense revolution under coach Mike Bellotti, then promoted Chip Kelly to head coach and changed the way the game was played by optimizing fast-paced football.
When the facilities arms race was escalating, Oregon built its so-called Death Star, a tinted-glass fortress with a barber shop, sleep pods and tech-integrated lockers. The $68 million Hatfield-Dowlin Complex, funded largely by Knight, opened in 2013.
The Ducks reached the national championship game in 2010 and 2014, losing each time.
They haven’t been back since, which suggests the ascent has stalled. That’s not the case. Through a whirlwind of coaching changes from Kelly’s successor, Mark Helfrich, to Willie Taggart to Mario Cristobal to Lanning in the span of only seven years, Oregon was still progressing.
“I think they’ve built a tremendous culture, and that culture has turned over through multiple coaches,” said Pintens, who credits his former boss, athletic director Rob Mullens, with overseeing the continued growth at Oregon.
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Even with Knight’s backing, Oregon is not among the top revenue-generating programs in college football.
“Oregon is not as resourced as some of the other top powers in college football,” Pintens said. “They lack a population base. They don’t play in a huge stadium.”
Autzen Stadium’s gameday experience is one of the best in the country, but the place seats about 56,000, about half the capacity of the largest stadiums in the Big Ten and SEC.
When Oregon spends, it spends on what matters most.
“If you want to be a top-10 team in college football, you better be invested in winning,” Oregon’s Dan Lanning said earlier this season in response to then-Oklahoma State coach Mike Gundy’s comments about how much the Ducks’ roster costs. “We spend to win.”
In 2020, the NCAA lifted its ban on paying college athletes for their name, image and likeness. Quickly, those deals became a proxy for paying players, and Oregon was again an early adopter. Founded by Knight and other prominent donors, Division Street quickly became one of college football’s most well-run NIL collectives, groups that pool funds from boosters to license players’ rights.
Taggart and then Cristobal had already changed the nature of Oregon recruiting, turning the school into a destination for blue-chippers, despite the school’s limited number of those prospects within its geographic footprint.
Lanning was hired away from Georgia to keep that going in 2021. His ability to embrace a more transactional form of recruiting while still establishing a winning culture has allowed Oregon to narrow the gap between itself and the likes of Ohio State and Georgia.
NIL has been “an equalizing force,” Pintens said.
“You could have better facilities, you could have better coaching, better everything, but at the end of the day, if you don’t have any dollars to support that, it’s going to be really difficult to put together a team,” he said.
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The transformation that took Oregon decades is happening much faster elsewhere, as paying players spreads talent around and gives the traditional have-nots a chance to become haves.
“The historical programs that weren’t able to compete, it did give them a chance to put a little jet propulsion into their football program, if that’s where they chose to invest,” Kilkenny said.
Fourth-seeded Big 12 champion Texas Tech, with a roster backed by billionaire booster Cody Campbell that reportedly cost more than $28 million, this season won its first outright conference title since 1955.
In the SEC, sixth-ranked Ole Miss has effectively mobilized its resources with the Grove Collective and ripped off three straight double-digit victory campaigns while LSU and Florida (with a combined six national titles) fired their head coaches this season.
In the Big Ten, Indiana, which started the year having lost more games than any other major college football program, has turned unprecedented investment into an unfathomable turnaround under coach Curt Cignetti. The Hoosiers kept rolling after the win in Eugene, knocked off Ohio State in the conference title game, and enter the Playoff as the No. 1 team in the country, boasting the program’s first Heisman Trophy winner in quarterback Fernando Mendoza. The Ducks are no longer the disruptors.
“The willingness and the belief in taking what had been done and saying, OK, we can be No. 1,” Kilkenny said. “We can win it all, and we can be a national brand, that has all happened.”
Oregon’s challenge now is not just to check the last box on the resume and join the blue bloods once and for all but to keep the new wave of gate-crashers from jumping ahead of them in line on the way to the top of the mountain.
Ralph Russo is a Senior Writer for The Athletic, covering college football. Before joining The Athletic, he spent 20 years as the lead national college football writer for The Associated Press. He also previously worked as the AP’s Mississippi-based sports writer and did a stint with The Denver Post. Ralph is a native New Yorker and a graduate of Fordham University.

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