Nick Saban’s outlook on the 4 remaining CFP teams (1:31)Nick Saban joins Pat McAfee and weighs in on the four teams remaining in the College Football Playoff. (1:31)
An hour before Oregon takes on USC on a late November afternoon, the longtime Nike designer whose credits include every Air Jordan from the 3s to the 15s, stands on the Autzen Stadium sidelines near midfield talking shoes with Oregon fans. Hatfield sports fluorescent green Nikes himself; a signature fedora hat adorns his head.
Hatfield is playing his role, one that began in 1996. His presence is not ornamental — he shakes hands with donors and talks to recruits, gleefully glad-handing for the university he attended and the football program whose modus operandi has come to be synonymous with Hatfield’s creativity and Nike’s branding.
In a sport that often tethers itself to history and tradition, Oregon has become a unique kind of vanguard over the past 25 years — a new-age blue blood well-positioned to take advantage of the sport’s evolution without being affixed to any notions of nostalgia or bygone eras.
And yet even as the program has had a very clear, swoosh-shaped throughline over this period, there’s a missing piece of the puzzle. Despite two national championship appearances and an active streak of three straight 11-win seasons, Oregon has yet to win it all.
It might not have been part of the original vision cooked up by Nike founder, Oregon alum and benefactor Phil Knight & Co. years ago, but a national title has now become the lodestar. To those inside and around the program, it has given purpose to the rising investment — be it financial, emotional or otherwise — that has been poured into trying to make this corner of the Pacific Northwest a college football power.
As Oregon takes on Indiana in the College Football Playoff Semifinal at the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl (7:30 p.m. ET on ESPN) in Atlanta, Georgia, it is just two wins away from its first title. In this latest version of what Oregon football has evolved to, the Ducks, led by coach Dan Lanning and still backed by Knight and Nike, might have their best shot of finally reaching the sport’s summit.
“I think that each year as he gets older, Phil wants things to happen just a little bit quicker,” said former Oregon coach Mike Bellotti. “The patience and the tolerance level diminishes, and he wants to see a national championship come to Oregon football in his lifetime.”
EVERYONE REMEMBERS JOEY Harrington — his 6-foot-4 frame adorned in Oregon’s rebranded uniforms and stretched out over 10 high-rise stories in Times Square.
It was 2001, and Oregon had just come off a 10-2 season that included a share of the Pac-12 title and a Holiday Bowl win over Texas; the expectations and excitement around the program were as high as they had ever been. With his last name crossed out in paint and “Heisman” in its place, Harrington was the poster boy — literally — for what the Ducks were aspiring to be.
“Now, there’s part of me that looks at it and thinks, ‘What in the world were you thinking? How did this not just spectacularly implode upon you?'” Harrington said with a laugh during a recent phone interview.
“I did not truly comprehend the magnitude or the ripple effect that would come from it, and maybe I was just naive,” Harrington said. “At the same time, I knew how big I wanted our program to be. If my goal was to change the trajectory of our football program, then of course, why wouldn’t they put a 10-story billboard of me in New York?”
The billboard was a pivotal moment, yes, but Harrington is quick to credit the collective effort it took to change Oregon’s perception.
“It wasn’t like Oregon was on the precipice of something great and just needed a spark,” Harrington said. “This was a lot of hard work that went into it by a lot of different people. And at the same time, all of those things had to come together in the right way. A lot of things had to go right.”
Perhaps it wasn’t a spark that Oregon needed, but a catalyst, and one with a lot of resources. In 1996, the Ducks had just come off appearances in the 1994 Rose Bowl and 1995 Cotton Bowl — Bellotti had coached the latter — with both ending in losses. Results aside, the fact that they even reached those games piqued Knight’s interest, who posed a question to Bellotti.
Around the same time at Nike, Knight brought in a group of confidants, including Hatfield, and tasked them with relaunching Oregon on a path toward success. Like Bellotti, Hatfield took a different route to arrive at the same conclusion: Recruiting needed to get better. But for recruiting to get better, Oregon needed to stand out — enter the rebranded uniforms, the new “O” and the strategy to distinguish itself from the rest of the sport’s landscape.
“[Bellotti] could have said no to the changes, but he understood how this could help him in his recruiting battles with other schools,” Hatfield said. “And it just took off like wildfire or something where he started getting better athletes, better players. We weren’t trying to catch up with Ohio State in one single bound, but we were on our way.”
Starting in 1997, Bellotti met with Knight every signing day and gave him a list of the top 10 things he thought the program needed. Knight would pick a handful of things from the list every year and execute on them. Soon enough, Knight’s financial backing influenced other donors to step up — in fact Knight himself, Bellotti said, would “get pissed” if others didn’t want to support the program or left it all up to him.
“This is the way Phil works, he tells you sort of what he wants you to do, and then you were supposed to actually figure it out,” Hatfield said. “And he never really applauds anybody. He’s just like, ‘Yeah, that’s not bad, I guess, but just do it bigger, faster.'”
Oregon won four of its next five bowl appearances, including the 2000 Holiday Bowl and 2001 Fiesta Bowl — both capped off the program’s first double-digit win campaigns. The Times Square billboard proved to be clairvoyant: Harrington played his way into being a Heisman finalist and more than that, he imbued the team with a kind of confidence that went beyond Knight’s involvement.
“This wasn’t just put in some Nike money and get new uniforms and now all of a sudden you’re winning conference championships,” Harrington said. “We had to work harder than everybody else. We, as a program, understood that if we wanted to be on that level, we had to do more work than those other schools.”
If there was a chip on Harrington’s shoulder back in 2001, the shadow of it still lingers. After losing only one game and winning the Pac-12 that season, the disappointment of not being able to play for a title that Oregon had never sniffed before then left its sting.
“The BCS took Nebraska, who hadn’t even won their conference championship. They took them over us,” Harrington said, disdain dripping from his voice. “So the irony to me is even with all of that work and with all of everything that had transpired at the end of my time, we were still viewed as not quite worthy.”
IT WAS 2010, and Rob Mullens had just taken the job as Oregon’s new athletic director. His first task? Fly to Idaho and look at a 10-by-10 piece of wood.
Mullens, who is now in his 16th year on the job, understands his role as a caretaker of Oregon’s brand as well as its success, especially as the rest of the college football world has caught up. That non-traditional approach, which actually positioned Oregon well to embrace changes such as NIL and the transfer portal, always needs to remain fresh.
“My job was to make sure we embraced innovation, that we were open to doing something no one else had done before,” Mullens said. “Just when you think that that’s the greatest thing we’ve come up with and we’ll never think of better, there’s another thing.”
On the football field, Bellotti had just stepped down and placed the program into the hands of Chip Kelly in 2009. Suddenly, Oregon’s quest for constant metamorphosis had an appropriate architect.
“You have to keep adding new things to this futuristic pitch, this image,” Hatfield said. “And so Chip Kelly was yet another component to this idea of being a modern program, because he was doing this offense that no one had ever seen before.”
Between Oregon’s branding and Kelly’s revolutionary spread offense, the Ducks rose to new heights, including two more Rose Bowls and a national championship game appearance in 2010. Despite a couple of losses in those games, the Ducks’ national appeal continued to grow.
“It was a perfect apex collision for the Oregon brand,” said former Nike creative director Todd Van Horne, who helped oversee the design for the initial rebranded uniforms as well as their latest, current set. “We started to see the explosion of the uniform craze and even big marquee brands starting to change up their uniforms because they saw Oregon doing it and how much players were interested in that.”
Still, a national title eluded them. Once Kelly left for the NFL in 2012, offensive coordinator Mark Helfrich took over. He helped the Ducks produce their first Heisman Trophy winner in Marcus Mariota and reach the 2015 national title game (this time, a loss to Ohio State), but his tenure ended with a 4-8 season in 2016.
Over the next few years, Oregon found itself in a precarious spot. The continuity that had started with Bellotti and continued with Kelly and Helfrich hit a snag. Willie Taggart was hired to replace Helfrich, but he left for Florida State after one season. Mario Cristobal was hired internally to replace him, but he bolted for his alma mater, Miami, after three seasons.
“I think there were maybe a few hiring mishaps,” Hatfield said. “And we didn’t want to be looked at as a stepping stone school.”
Once Cristobal exited, Mullens and Oregon brass set their eyes on a carburetor of a coordinator in Georgia with SEC experience and perhaps most importantly, a vision for how to succeed in college football’s new future.
“I think it’s kind of part of our DNA, right? We are willing to be first movers. We’re willing to try things, and quite frankly, that’s what attracted us to Dan,” Mullens said. “When we interviewed him, he was at a time when there was rapid change in the industry and some people were lamenting it a little bit. He 100% embraced it and said, ‘This is coming. This is what’s happening. This is how we’re going to attack it.'”