Inside Oregon's rise as a college football blue blood

EUGENE, OR. -- Tinker Hatfield is in his element.

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.

Without missing a beat, Hatfield walks over to a wheeled contraption. He says he came up with this idea in 2008 when he was approached by a team doctor and trainers about improving players' hydration levels. Hatfield pushes a small silver button that lights up and suddenly, the machine (not Nike branded) whirs and unfolds vertically like an automated tent, revealing a portable toilet inside that cleans itself.

"We call it the O-Pee," Hatfield says, using both his hands to create the famous Oregon "O" that gives the machine its nickname. "This way, players can hydrate more during the game, and they don't have to worry about having a bathroom nearby."

The designer flashes a smile and a knowing look as if to say: "We think of everything."

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.

"Let's not think about Oregon in that traditional way," Hatfield says of what his vision was for the program at the turn of the century. "Let's think about Oregon as this vision into the future."

For Oregon football, it's easier that there's not much history before the '90s to romanticize. But since, its profile has come to resemble that of the sport's elites. Top recruiting classes? Check. State-of-the-art facilities? Good and getting better. Uniforms that create their own news cycles? Too many to count. Conference championships? Four from the Pac-12 and one from its debut Big Ten season. Competitive NIL resources? Enough that other coaches around the country can't help themselves but talk about it.

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.

"[At first] we didn't really think about winning a national championship -- we just wanted to be good, better than most are, up there with the best," Hatfield said. "There are schools that are national brands, and I think Oregon has arrived in that realm. Now it's like, well, we want to win."

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.

The billboard, at the time, cost Oregon $250,000.

"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.

"What do you need to take this program to the next level?"

Bellotti had an immediate, practical answer: an indoor practice facility. Knight wanted to know how soon it could get done. Bellotti began to talk about fundraising, but Knight was ready to make it happen, he just wanted to know how long it would actually take to build.

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.

"That would become the tall fir [basketball] court that got so much feedback," Mullens said.

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.'"

If Bellotti was the Oregon coach who walked so Kelly could run, then Lanning has taken the Ducks airborne. In four seasons, he has posted a 48-7 record and produced back-to-back 11-win seasons with CFP berths. But all it takes is watching one video of Lanning speaking to this Ducks team -- or of him shirtless on "College Gameday" -- to realize that his impact is unique and goes beyond any stats.

"Dan is the perfect combination of the new and the old," Harrington said. "I honestly cannot think of a better person to be running this program right now."

"He might be the greatest accelerator of our brand," Mullens said.

Lanning's thought process was simple: The Ducks had developed a reputation for being on the cutting edge, often employing explosive offenses and trying to push the envelope. What if he could get them to play elite defense too?

"The first thing I always say when I think of Oregon, big picture, is innovative," Lanning said. "This is a place where everybody is saying, 'Let's figure out how we can be the best at this.'"

Sitting inside his office, which overlooks the construction site of Oregon's brand-new, 170,000-square foot indoor facility set to open in 2027, Lanning remembered being home in 2021 when he got a call from Knight.

"I knew he was very involved. I didn't know necessarily to what extent," Lanning said. "I think anybody that knew anything about Oregon knew that he had an interest and was committed to helping make this place great."

Whether its latest facility seems ostentatious or essential, it embodies the kind of approach Oregon has had since it began this journey with Knight as its patron. It doesn't want to just keep up with the rest of what the sport's top programs are doing; it wants to do it better, and it wants to do it differently. While bells, whistles and the latest Nike tech won't produce wins, the Ducks are of the mindset that if they can help, even just 1%, then it's worth it.

"We are very fortunate to have passionate donors across the board and to have unique donors like Mr. and Mrs. Knight," Mullens said. "[They] created a global brand that started right here from his experience as a student-athlete. We're extremely fortunate. There's no doubt. We wouldn't trade it for anything."

Case in point: The indoor facility that Bellotti asked Knight for in the late '90s has now mutated to a reportedly $100 million project that will be 100-feet tall. The ceiling quite literally continues to rise.

BACK IN AUTZEN, Hatfield's work does not stop once the game kicks off. He barely watches the live action, padded players blocking his view, instead stealing glances at the big screen on either end to see what has transpired.

Hatfield keeps his eyes directed toward the areas that coaches and players inhabit. At this point in his career -- and his role with both Nike and Oregon football -- his job is to notice. So he takes notes -- about the uniforms, about any challenges players are having that could be improved upon. He rarely passes on an opportunity to let his right brain flex in service of his alma mater or allow his notoriety to bring the program some kind of edge.

While Hatfield keeps an eye on things from below, Knight sometimes watches from a box above, one that still includes access for him to listen in on the playcalling between coaches when he's able to make it to a game.

"Phil's not able to mix and mingle like he used to, but he still shows up at a fair number of the games. He just can't get down on the field and bump shoulders with everybody, but he loves to go into the locker room after a big win," Hatfield said. "It makes me tear up to speak of it. So I think everybody wants to win, yes, but I think everybody wants to win also for him."

Though the slightest bit of urgency is palpable in Hatfield's voice, that word is one he and several others shy away from when brought up in the context of Oregon's and Knight's quest. He is 87 years old, and though Oregon looks to be a mainstay of the playoff for years to come, things can change fast. There's always a chance that every run at a title might be the last for some time. Just ask Harrington.

"It hurts like hell. I mean, it really does," Harrington said of still not being able to claim a title. "For all of us who have put so much work into it and have been so close so many times and said, 'Ah, this is the year it's going to happen.' How many times have we gotten close? God, we still don't have a national championship."

Lanning has declared his loyalty and affinity for the job time and time again, giving the program an anchor on which to holster its long-term efforts. While Hatfield continues to try and innovate and Knight remains a willing benefactor, the focus is undoubtedly on the present.

Oregon might still carry with it the sheen that got it here, building upon it through an obsession with what's next, but it's not alone. Not only are the sport's top programs playing the same game, but others, such as Texas Tech and Indiana, have surfaced by creating their own innovative playbooks, maximizing the transfer portal and adopting a kind of new-money, forward-thinking approach that has leveled the playing field. Texas Tech even took a page out of Oregon's book and invested in a billboard to announce the signing of Brendan Sorsby.

Back when Harrington donned the chrome green helmet, the goal might have been to simply feel like Oregon belonged in the conversation, that it deserved a fair shot at winning it all. Now, few can argue that the Ducks don't belong, but membership among the sport's elite still has a prerequisite. That elusive national title looms larger than ever.

"I think Phil is happy Oregon is in the mix. The fact that they are in it and he's been able to help put them in it, he feels good about that," Bellotti said. "But he's a guy that is results-oriented. He won't be happy until a championship is won -- that's Oregon's goal, and that's his goal."