University of Nike by Joshua Hunt

Author:Joshua Hunt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2018-10-22T16:00:00+00:00

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The Ducks spent the rest of the college football season exacting revenge on other teams for the stinging loss they’d suffered to Stanford: the Washington State University Cougars fell in a game that saw the Ducks gain 565 yards of total offense; Harrington threw six touchdown passes, matching his own record from the previous season, in a rout of Arizona State; and the UCLA Bruins, considered Oregon’s most capable challenger for the conference crown, lost by a single point in a nail-biter that earned Oregon its third conference title and burnished Harrington’s chances at winning the Heisman. In December, the Pac-10 Conference champions took a victory lap around the Oregon State Beavers at the annual Civil War match, and on New Year’s Day the number-two-ranked Ducks faced Colorado, ranked number three in the nation, at the Fiesta Bowl.

Harrington would rather have been playing in the Rose Bowl on January 1, 2002, but he didn’t treat the Fiesta Bowl like a consolation prize. It was, in fact, some of the best football he and his team had ever played. Throughout the year, Oregon’s offense had averaged thirty-four points per game, gaining the most yards per play while allowing the fewest sacks in their conference—strong numbers that the team handily surpassed while holding Colorado’s potent offense to just forty-nine rushing yards. Harrington, in the final game of his college football career, threw for 350 yards and four touchdowns in the 38–16 victory over the Buffaloes. He was passed over for the Heisman, but Harrington was nevertheless elated over his team’s performance throughout the season. He was picked third overall in the 2002 NFL draft.

“I was the kid that helped turn a local team into a national college football power,” said Harrington, who won twenty-seven of the thirty games he played with the Ducks.

Years later, NBA broadcaster Ahmad Rashād, who had played football at the University of Oregon in the 1970s, recalled Harrington’s Fiesta Bowl performance, and his brilliant tenure with the Ducks, as a key reason for the team’s ascension into the ranks of the perennial contenders in college football.

“For any kid in the country who wants to play for a big-time program, Oregon is a real option,” he said. “In the past, it hasn’t been.”

Beyond Harrington’s spectacular final season with the Ducks, Rashād offered two other reasons why the University of Oregon had become a college football powerhouse and a draw for the country’s best young athletes: the newly renovated Autzen Stadium and its state-of-the-art locker rooms, which had both come courtesy of Knight’s financial contributions to the program. These impressive facilities gave the Ducks an edge when it came to attracting the nation’s top high-school football prospects, which was important in the increasingly competitive world of college football recruiting. Nike had transformed the University of Oregon into its own brand, but the value of that brand depended on bringing the best athletes to Eugene year after year. Anything less would slow the trickle-down economics of the University of

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