- 1,110
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- Jul 23, 2007
2011 College Football "The Real been hacked!!!!" .
- Thread in 'Sports & Training' Thread starter Started by Chester McFloppy,
- Start date
- 9,622
- 783
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- Feb 9, 2009
For the record I don't like it, I never liked the idea of the Big 12 breaking up. It's stupid & unnecessary.
- 9,622
- 783
- Joined
- Feb 9, 2009
For the record I don't like it, I never liked the idea of the Big 12 breaking up. It's stupid & unnecessary.
- 31,964
- 1,056
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- Jul 23, 2007
Originally Posted by Newbs24
Originally Posted by GUNNA GET IT
Vols will be starting 3 true Freshman on Defense.
Justin Coleman at CB
AJ Johnson and Curt Maggit at OLB.
AJ & Curt are going to be Problems for at least 3 years
quietly Justin has been the steal of the 2011 class. he was an athlete playing mostly WR in HS. early enrolled and put on a show defensively.
Are these guys headcases? Hope the Vols can get back to a top tier program in the W/L column. Better for CFB with them in the Top 25 constantly.
Even tho I do mind seeing them lose. Sorry bro.
Noooo those kids are great.Problems for the opponents is what I meant
- 31,964
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- Joined
- Jul 23, 2007
Originally Posted by Newbs24
Originally Posted by GUNNA GET IT
Vols will be starting 3 true Freshman on Defense.
Justin Coleman at CB
AJ Johnson and Curt Maggit at OLB.
AJ & Curt are going to be Problems for at least 3 years
quietly Justin has been the steal of the 2011 class. he was an athlete playing mostly WR in HS. early enrolled and put on a show defensively.
Are these guys headcases? Hope the Vols can get back to a top tier program in the W/L column. Better for CFB with them in the Top 25 constantly.
Even tho I do mind seeing them lose. Sorry bro.
Noooo those kids are great.Problems for the opponents is what I meant
- 3,166
- 744
- Joined
- Jul 23, 2005
i hate that we lost him
- 3,166
- 744
- Joined
- Jul 23, 2005
i hate that we lost him
- 25,494
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- Sep 1, 2004
i think most would like it to stay around for football and bball.
but can it really stay around with 9 teams? zero chance of them getting arkansas,BYU or ND all 3 are a fantasy dream. dont see Lousville or pitt leaving the big east for the big 12. and does Houston, Air Force or SMU really do anything for the big 12?
- 25,494
- 653
- Joined
- Sep 1, 2004
i think most would like it to stay around for football and bball.
but can it really stay around with 9 teams? zero chance of them getting arkansas,BYU or ND all 3 are a fantasy dream. dont see Lousville or pitt leaving the big east for the big 12. and does Houston, Air Force or SMU really do anything for the big 12?
- 5,409
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- Joined
- Oct 22, 2004
You clowns doubting THE University of South Carolina didn't see MrPalmetto's SEC Heisman hopefuls article featuring the specimen Alshon Jeffery and the Lattimonster. He's projected 35 total TDs between the two of them, though I don't know if he's including their certain appearances in the SEC Championship and BCS bowl in those numbers. Otherwise, how are they gonna lose any regular season games with 3 TDs from those two alone?
- 5,409
- 923
- Joined
- Oct 22, 2004
You clowns doubting THE University of South Carolina didn't see MrPalmetto's SEC Heisman hopefuls article featuring the specimen Alshon Jeffery and the Lattimonster. He's projected 35 total TDs between the two of them, though I don't know if he's including their certain appearances in the SEC Championship and BCS bowl in those numbers. Otherwise, how are they gonna lose any regular season games with 3 TDs from those two alone?
- 25,234
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- May 30, 2006
It cannot live with 9 teams and it won't live for any length of time with UH or SMU coming into fill the void...
They might could make it work for awhile, because it'll now be Texas and Oklahoma and a bunch of teams that are happy to be there and cannot go away on their own with the exception of maybe Mizzou. Everyone else will give way to UT and OU and be happy they're still remotely relevant.
Anybody that blames A&M for making this decision is ridiculously stupid. It's smart. Now win the Big XII on the way out the door and shut everyone up.
They might could make it work for awhile, because it'll now be Texas and Oklahoma and a bunch of teams that are happy to be there and cannot go away on their own with the exception of maybe Mizzou. Everyone else will give way to UT and OU and be happy they're still remotely relevant.
Anybody that blames A&M for making this decision is ridiculously stupid. It's smart. Now win the Big XII on the way out the door and shut everyone up.
- 25,234
- 13,300
- Joined
- May 30, 2006
It cannot live with 9 teams and it won't live for any length of time with UH or SMU coming into fill the void...
They might could make it work for awhile, because it'll now be Texas and Oklahoma and a bunch of teams that are happy to be there and cannot go away on their own with the exception of maybe Mizzou. Everyone else will give way to UT and OU and be happy they're still remotely relevant.
Anybody that blames A&M for making this decision is ridiculously stupid. It's smart. Now win the Big XII on the way out the door and shut everyone up.
They might could make it work for awhile, because it'll now be Texas and Oklahoma and a bunch of teams that are happy to be there and cannot go away on their own with the exception of maybe Mizzou. Everyone else will give way to UT and OU and be happy they're still remotely relevant.
Anybody that blames A&M for making this decision is ridiculously stupid. It's smart. Now win the Big XII on the way out the door and shut everyone up.
- 30,498
- 5,958
- Joined
- Mar 2, 2011
A&M would go to the SECW right?
- 30,498
- 5,958
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- Mar 2, 2011
A&M would go to the SECW right?
- 2,791
- 11
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- Mar 29, 2002
this still disgusts me.
- 2,791
- 11
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- Mar 29, 2002
this still disgusts me.
- 3,580
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- Oct 5, 2011
Ingram, Clowney and Taylor rushing the passer on 3rd downs??
Because Ellis Johnson has to get those 3 on the field together in passing down situations.
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- Joined
- Oct 5, 2011
Ingram, Clowney and Taylor rushing the passer on 3rd downs??
Because Ellis Johnson has to get those 3 on the field together in passing down situations.
3
39478
Guest
Here's an interesting read about Oregon's uniforms, but from a more economic point of view. You'll know what I mean if you read the article. Good sports reading IMO
How Does Oregon Football Keep Winning?
Is it the uniforms?
By Michael KrusePOSTED AUGUST 30, 2011
Steve #%%%+/Getty Images
FACEBOOK
TWITTER
PRINT
E-MAIL
There is next to no reason the University of Oregon should have a good football team. Eugene is a small city and is not near a major media market, there's very little local college-caliber talent,1 and for literally 100 years the Ducks did almost nothing but lose.2 But the past decade and a half has been different. They've been to the Rose Bowl, the Cotton Bowl, the Fiesta Bowl, and last year's national championship game, and they will start this season Saturday night against Louisiana State in Arlington, Texas, ranked third in the country. How did this happen?
At the top of the list of reasons: their uniforms.
Hyperbole?
Not to Rachel Bachman. "It all starts with the uniforms," said the sports business reporter for theOregonian.
Not to Paul Swangard. "The uniforms, I think, more than anything else," said the managing director of the university's Warsaw Sports Marketing Center, "are probably the key ingredient."
And not to Tinker Hatfield. "What is a more visible way to turn up the heat and create a personality," the famous Nike designer said, "than through the football uniforms?"3
Oregon clearly is the beneficiary of its unique relationship with Nike boss Phil Knight, a 1959 alum who has used his fortune to give the Ducks every potential material advantage. But the most consistently conspicuous portion of Knight's lavish contributions are the team's much-discussed uniforms — the yellows and the greens, the blacks and the grays, the highlighter neons and the stormtrooper whites, the many different helmets and jerseys and pants and socks and shoes, the more than 500 possible combinations in all.
The football Ducks of Oregon are something new. They didn't get people to watch because they got good. They got good because they got people to watch. They are college sports' undisputed champions of the 21st century's attention economy.
The school's been playing the sport, mostly badly, since 1894. But then it made the 1995 Rose Bowl. And then it made the 1996 Cotton Bowl.4
The Ducks lost both those games, but this, according to the creation tale,5 was enough to interest Knight. His company made so much money from the mid-'80s to the mid-'90s that smart people started writing books about what it was doing. Nike, the authors agreed, was a new kind of company in a new kind of world. The sneaker behemoth based in Beaverton, Ore., was selling packaging as much as it was selling products.
"Nike is not a production company," Robert Goldman and Stephen Papson wrote in Nike Culture: The Sign of the Swoosh. It "designs, develops and markets the branded goods."
"The whole thing happens on TV now," Knight said in 1993. "The final game of the NCAA basketball tournament is better than any runway in Paris for launching a shoe. Kids climb up next to the screen to see what the players are wearing."6
So after the Cotton Bowl loss, Knight asked the Ducks' coach a question, and he asked Nike's designers a question.
He asked the coach: What do you need from me?
He asked the designers: How can we make teenagers who are good at football want to come to the University of Oregon?7
About a year later, on the other side of the country, the head of a think tank and a visiting scholar at Berkeley's Center for Research on Social Change gave a wonky talk at a conference in Cambridge, Mass. "We are headed," Michael H. Goldhaber said,8 "into what I call the attention economy."9
Economics is the study of the allocation of resources that are scarce. These days, more and more, information isn't scarce. Stuff isn't scarce. What's scarce is attention. The companies that win in an attention economy are those that win the eyeballs of people who have too much to look at. Too many ads. Too many screens in too many places. Too many games on too many channels on too many days of the week.
"This new economy," Goldhaber said in Cambridge in January 1997, "is based on endless originality.
"If you have enough attention," he added, "you can get anything you want."
John C. Beck cowrote a book called The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business. "Just go back to what gets attention in the animal world," he said.10 One thing is fear. Another thing is bright colors.
"If attention is now at the center of the economy rather than stuff, then so is style," UCLA professor Richard Lanham wrote in The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information. "It moves from the periphery to the center. Style and substance trade places.
"Push style to the extreme," Lanham wrote, "and it becomes substance."11
The answer Knight got from the coach was an indoor practice facility. The coach got that and more. Since then, Knight has spent some $300 million on stadium additions, luxury boxes, and palatial locker rooms. All of these things obviously are on the list of reasons Oregon's football team got good.12
But back in Beaverton, the Nike designers did their part, using the Ducks program as part laboratory, part showroom.
Blocky, standard letters became sleek, modern fonts. Wings on the shoulders? Diamond designs on the knees? Silver shoes worn at Southern Cal? "Nothing," Nike creative director Todd Van Horne said, "is off the table." The paint for the dark green helmets was made with glass beads and cost $2,400 a gallon. There were fall fashion shows.
"They look hatched from an alien pod," Bachman wrote in the Oregonian, "sent to Earth to seek first downs and souvenir sales."13
This, Michael Smith wrote in the SportsBusiness Journal, was part of "Nike's 15-year project to build Oregon football into a national power largely on the strength of marketing and branding."14
Tradition? Tradition is great where it's a sellable, marketable commodity. Alabama can sell tradition. Penn State can sell tradition. Michigan can sell tradition. At those places, tradition is the differentiation, but at the schools where it's not? They have to go in the opposite direction. And no one has done that better, or more consciously, than Nike and Oregon, which for the purposes of this conversation are essentially one and the same. Oregon's tradition at this point is the overtly embraced lack of tradition. Change.
"We wanted to be out there, to be purposely controversial," Hatfield told Smith. "That's a part of what we do that's not very well understood. A lot of the sports writers at first hated it" — fans, too, by the way, and still do — "and that's actually what we wanted. If you're purposely trying to stir up the nest and increase visibility, you want them saying something."
"It's probably the easiest way for Oregon to cut through the clutter of college football, to be undeniably known for something," Swangard said. "If no one knows your product exists, there is no demand for your product, and at the end of the day it's about 18-year-old kids. The uniforms are the key ingredient to getting those bodies there, and the bodies are what win you football games."
Like LeGarrette Blount, from faraway Perry, Fla.
"The uniforms are awesome," he said in 2008 when he was asked why he wanted to go all the way to the Pacific Northwest to play football.15
Like LaMichael James, from Texarkana, Texas.
"I loved the uniforms," he said before the 2010 Rose Bowl, "and then I got to know more about Oregon."16 And then he became a Heisman Trophy finalist for the Ducks.
Kids.
Climb up next to the screen.
To see what the players are wearing.
The past couple of years, as the Ducks were making their way to the Rose Bowl and their first no. 1 national ranking and then this past January's national championship game, which they lost to Auburn on a field goal with two seconds left, more teams around the country started wearing uniforms that made them look like … Oregon. West Virginia and Virginia Tech. Miami and Boise and TCU. Now Arizona State and Oklahoma State and Wyoming.17
Nike's designers are still working. The evolution is ongoing. All those other schools? They won't look like Oregon for long.
Watch.
Michael Kruse is a staff writer at the St. Petersburg Times and a contributing writer for Grantland. Follow him on Twitter at @michaelkruse.
How Does Oregon Football Keep Winning?
Is it the uniforms?
By Michael KrusePOSTED AUGUST 30, 2011
Steve #%%%+/Getty Images
There is next to no reason the University of Oregon should have a good football team. Eugene is a small city and is not near a major media market, there's very little local college-caliber talent,1 and for literally 100 years the Ducks did almost nothing but lose.2 But the past decade and a half has been different. They've been to the Rose Bowl, the Cotton Bowl, the Fiesta Bowl, and last year's national championship game, and they will start this season Saturday night against Louisiana State in Arlington, Texas, ranked third in the country. How did this happen?
At the top of the list of reasons: their uniforms.
Hyperbole?
Not to Rachel Bachman. "It all starts with the uniforms," said the sports business reporter for theOregonian.
Not to Paul Swangard. "The uniforms, I think, more than anything else," said the managing director of the university's Warsaw Sports Marketing Center, "are probably the key ingredient."
And not to Tinker Hatfield. "What is a more visible way to turn up the heat and create a personality," the famous Nike designer said, "than through the football uniforms?"3
Oregon clearly is the beneficiary of its unique relationship with Nike boss Phil Knight, a 1959 alum who has used his fortune to give the Ducks every potential material advantage. But the most consistently conspicuous portion of Knight's lavish contributions are the team's much-discussed uniforms — the yellows and the greens, the blacks and the grays, the highlighter neons and the stormtrooper whites, the many different helmets and jerseys and pants and socks and shoes, the more than 500 possible combinations in all.
The football Ducks of Oregon are something new. They didn't get people to watch because they got good. They got good because they got people to watch. They are college sports' undisputed champions of the 21st century's attention economy.
The school's been playing the sport, mostly badly, since 1894. But then it made the 1995 Rose Bowl. And then it made the 1996 Cotton Bowl.4
The Ducks lost both those games, but this, according to the creation tale,5 was enough to interest Knight. His company made so much money from the mid-'80s to the mid-'90s that smart people started writing books about what it was doing. Nike, the authors agreed, was a new kind of company in a new kind of world. The sneaker behemoth based in Beaverton, Ore., was selling packaging as much as it was selling products.
"Nike is not a production company," Robert Goldman and Stephen Papson wrote in Nike Culture: The Sign of the Swoosh. It "designs, develops and markets the branded goods."
"The whole thing happens on TV now," Knight said in 1993. "The final game of the NCAA basketball tournament is better than any runway in Paris for launching a shoe. Kids climb up next to the screen to see what the players are wearing."6
So after the Cotton Bowl loss, Knight asked the Ducks' coach a question, and he asked Nike's designers a question.
He asked the coach: What do you need from me?
He asked the designers: How can we make teenagers who are good at football want to come to the University of Oregon?7
About a year later, on the other side of the country, the head of a think tank and a visiting scholar at Berkeley's Center for Research on Social Change gave a wonky talk at a conference in Cambridge, Mass. "We are headed," Michael H. Goldhaber said,8 "into what I call the attention economy."9
Economics is the study of the allocation of resources that are scarce. These days, more and more, information isn't scarce. Stuff isn't scarce. What's scarce is attention. The companies that win in an attention economy are those that win the eyeballs of people who have too much to look at. Too many ads. Too many screens in too many places. Too many games on too many channels on too many days of the week.
"This new economy," Goldhaber said in Cambridge in January 1997, "is based on endless originality.
"If you have enough attention," he added, "you can get anything you want."
John C. Beck cowrote a book called The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business. "Just go back to what gets attention in the animal world," he said.10 One thing is fear. Another thing is bright colors.
"If attention is now at the center of the economy rather than stuff, then so is style," UCLA professor Richard Lanham wrote in The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information. "It moves from the periphery to the center. Style and substance trade places.
"Push style to the extreme," Lanham wrote, "and it becomes substance."11
The answer Knight got from the coach was an indoor practice facility. The coach got that and more. Since then, Knight has spent some $300 million on stadium additions, luxury boxes, and palatial locker rooms. All of these things obviously are on the list of reasons Oregon's football team got good.12
But back in Beaverton, the Nike designers did their part, using the Ducks program as part laboratory, part showroom.
Blocky, standard letters became sleek, modern fonts. Wings on the shoulders? Diamond designs on the knees? Silver shoes worn at Southern Cal? "Nothing," Nike creative director Todd Van Horne said, "is off the table." The paint for the dark green helmets was made with glass beads and cost $2,400 a gallon. There were fall fashion shows.
"They look hatched from an alien pod," Bachman wrote in the Oregonian, "sent to Earth to seek first downs and souvenir sales."13
This, Michael Smith wrote in the SportsBusiness Journal, was part of "Nike's 15-year project to build Oregon football into a national power largely on the strength of marketing and branding."14
Tradition? Tradition is great where it's a sellable, marketable commodity. Alabama can sell tradition. Penn State can sell tradition. Michigan can sell tradition. At those places, tradition is the differentiation, but at the schools where it's not? They have to go in the opposite direction. And no one has done that better, or more consciously, than Nike and Oregon, which for the purposes of this conversation are essentially one and the same. Oregon's tradition at this point is the overtly embraced lack of tradition. Change.
"We wanted to be out there, to be purposely controversial," Hatfield told Smith. "That's a part of what we do that's not very well understood. A lot of the sports writers at first hated it" — fans, too, by the way, and still do — "and that's actually what we wanted. If you're purposely trying to stir up the nest and increase visibility, you want them saying something."
"It's probably the easiest way for Oregon to cut through the clutter of college football, to be undeniably known for something," Swangard said. "If no one knows your product exists, there is no demand for your product, and at the end of the day it's about 18-year-old kids. The uniforms are the key ingredient to getting those bodies there, and the bodies are what win you football games."
Like LeGarrette Blount, from faraway Perry, Fla.
"The uniforms are awesome," he said in 2008 when he was asked why he wanted to go all the way to the Pacific Northwest to play football.15
Like LaMichael James, from Texarkana, Texas.
"I loved the uniforms," he said before the 2010 Rose Bowl, "and then I got to know more about Oregon."16 And then he became a Heisman Trophy finalist for the Ducks.
Kids.
Climb up next to the screen.
To see what the players are wearing.
The past couple of years, as the Ducks were making their way to the Rose Bowl and their first no. 1 national ranking and then this past January's national championship game, which they lost to Auburn on a field goal with two seconds left, more teams around the country started wearing uniforms that made them look like … Oregon. West Virginia and Virginia Tech. Miami and Boise and TCU. Now Arizona State and Oklahoma State and Wyoming.17
Nike's designers are still working. The evolution is ongoing. All those other schools? They won't look like Oregon for long.
Watch.
Michael Kruse is a staff writer at the St. Petersburg Times and a contributing writer for Grantland. Follow him on Twitter at @michaelkruse.
3
39478
Guest
Here's an interesting read about Oregon's uniforms, but from a more economic point of view. You'll know what I mean if you read the article. Good sports reading IMO
How Does Oregon Football Keep Winning?
Is it the uniforms?
By Michael KrusePOSTED AUGUST 30, 2011
Steve #%%%+/Getty Images
FACEBOOK
TWITTER
PRINT
E-MAIL
There is next to no reason the University of Oregon should have a good football team. Eugene is a small city and is not near a major media market, there's very little local college-caliber talent,1 and for literally 100 years the Ducks did almost nothing but lose.2 But the past decade and a half has been different. They've been to the Rose Bowl, the Cotton Bowl, the Fiesta Bowl, and last year's national championship game, and they will start this season Saturday night against Louisiana State in Arlington, Texas, ranked third in the country. How did this happen?
At the top of the list of reasons: their uniforms.
Hyperbole?
Not to Rachel Bachman. "It all starts with the uniforms," said the sports business reporter for theOregonian.
Not to Paul Swangard. "The uniforms, I think, more than anything else," said the managing director of the university's Warsaw Sports Marketing Center, "are probably the key ingredient."
And not to Tinker Hatfield. "What is a more visible way to turn up the heat and create a personality," the famous Nike designer said, "than through the football uniforms?"3
Oregon clearly is the beneficiary of its unique relationship with Nike boss Phil Knight, a 1959 alum who has used his fortune to give the Ducks every potential material advantage. But the most consistently conspicuous portion of Knight's lavish contributions are the team's much-discussed uniforms — the yellows and the greens, the blacks and the grays, the highlighter neons and the stormtrooper whites, the many different helmets and jerseys and pants and socks and shoes, the more than 500 possible combinations in all.
The football Ducks of Oregon are something new. They didn't get people to watch because they got good. They got good because they got people to watch. They are college sports' undisputed champions of the 21st century's attention economy.
The school's been playing the sport, mostly badly, since 1894. But then it made the 1995 Rose Bowl. And then it made the 1996 Cotton Bowl.4
The Ducks lost both those games, but this, according to the creation tale,5 was enough to interest Knight. His company made so much money from the mid-'80s to the mid-'90s that smart people started writing books about what it was doing. Nike, the authors agreed, was a new kind of company in a new kind of world. The sneaker behemoth based in Beaverton, Ore., was selling packaging as much as it was selling products.
"Nike is not a production company," Robert Goldman and Stephen Papson wrote in Nike Culture: The Sign of the Swoosh. It "designs, develops and markets the branded goods."
"The whole thing happens on TV now," Knight said in 1993. "The final game of the NCAA basketball tournament is better than any runway in Paris for launching a shoe. Kids climb up next to the screen to see what the players are wearing."6
So after the Cotton Bowl loss, Knight asked the Ducks' coach a question, and he asked Nike's designers a question.
He asked the coach: What do you need from me?
He asked the designers: How can we make teenagers who are good at football want to come to the University of Oregon?7
About a year later, on the other side of the country, the head of a think tank and a visiting scholar at Berkeley's Center for Research on Social Change gave a wonky talk at a conference in Cambridge, Mass. "We are headed," Michael H. Goldhaber said,8 "into what I call the attention economy."9
Economics is the study of the allocation of resources that are scarce. These days, more and more, information isn't scarce. Stuff isn't scarce. What's scarce is attention. The companies that win in an attention economy are those that win the eyeballs of people who have too much to look at. Too many ads. Too many screens in too many places. Too many games on too many channels on too many days of the week.
"This new economy," Goldhaber said in Cambridge in January 1997, "is based on endless originality.
"If you have enough attention," he added, "you can get anything you want."
John C. Beck cowrote a book called The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business. "Just go back to what gets attention in the animal world," he said.10 One thing is fear. Another thing is bright colors.
"If attention is now at the center of the economy rather than stuff, then so is style," UCLA professor Richard Lanham wrote in The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information. "It moves from the periphery to the center. Style and substance trade places.
"Push style to the extreme," Lanham wrote, "and it becomes substance."11
The answer Knight got from the coach was an indoor practice facility. The coach got that and more. Since then, Knight has spent some $300 million on stadium additions, luxury boxes, and palatial locker rooms. All of these things obviously are on the list of reasons Oregon's football team got good.12
But back in Beaverton, the Nike designers did their part, using the Ducks program as part laboratory, part showroom.
Blocky, standard letters became sleek, modern fonts. Wings on the shoulders? Diamond designs on the knees? Silver shoes worn at Southern Cal? "Nothing," Nike creative director Todd Van Horne said, "is off the table." The paint for the dark green helmets was made with glass beads and cost $2,400 a gallon. There were fall fashion shows.
"They look hatched from an alien pod," Bachman wrote in the Oregonian, "sent to Earth to seek first downs and souvenir sales."13
This, Michael Smith wrote in the SportsBusiness Journal, was part of "Nike's 15-year project to build Oregon football into a national power largely on the strength of marketing and branding."14
Tradition? Tradition is great where it's a sellable, marketable commodity. Alabama can sell tradition. Penn State can sell tradition. Michigan can sell tradition. At those places, tradition is the differentiation, but at the schools where it's not? They have to go in the opposite direction. And no one has done that better, or more consciously, than Nike and Oregon, which for the purposes of this conversation are essentially one and the same. Oregon's tradition at this point is the overtly embraced lack of tradition. Change.
"We wanted to be out there, to be purposely controversial," Hatfield told Smith. "That's a part of what we do that's not very well understood. A lot of the sports writers at first hated it" — fans, too, by the way, and still do — "and that's actually what we wanted. If you're purposely trying to stir up the nest and increase visibility, you want them saying something."
"It's probably the easiest way for Oregon to cut through the clutter of college football, to be undeniably known for something," Swangard said. "If no one knows your product exists, there is no demand for your product, and at the end of the day it's about 18-year-old kids. The uniforms are the key ingredient to getting those bodies there, and the bodies are what win you football games."
Like LeGarrette Blount, from faraway Perry, Fla.
"The uniforms are awesome," he said in 2008 when he was asked why he wanted to go all the way to the Pacific Northwest to play football.15
Like LaMichael James, from Texarkana, Texas.
"I loved the uniforms," he said before the 2010 Rose Bowl, "and then I got to know more about Oregon."16 And then he became a Heisman Trophy finalist for the Ducks.
Kids.
Climb up next to the screen.
To see what the players are wearing.
The past couple of years, as the Ducks were making their way to the Rose Bowl and their first no. 1 national ranking and then this past January's national championship game, which they lost to Auburn on a field goal with two seconds left, more teams around the country started wearing uniforms that made them look like … Oregon. West Virginia and Virginia Tech. Miami and Boise and TCU. Now Arizona State and Oklahoma State and Wyoming.17
Nike's designers are still working. The evolution is ongoing. All those other schools? They won't look like Oregon for long.
Watch.
Michael Kruse is a staff writer at the St. Petersburg Times and a contributing writer for Grantland. Follow him on Twitter at @michaelkruse.
How Does Oregon Football Keep Winning?
Is it the uniforms?
By Michael KrusePOSTED AUGUST 30, 2011
Steve #%%%+/Getty Images
There is next to no reason the University of Oregon should have a good football team. Eugene is a small city and is not near a major media market, there's very little local college-caliber talent,1 and for literally 100 years the Ducks did almost nothing but lose.2 But the past decade and a half has been different. They've been to the Rose Bowl, the Cotton Bowl, the Fiesta Bowl, and last year's national championship game, and they will start this season Saturday night against Louisiana State in Arlington, Texas, ranked third in the country. How did this happen?
At the top of the list of reasons: their uniforms.
Hyperbole?
Not to Rachel Bachman. "It all starts with the uniforms," said the sports business reporter for theOregonian.
Not to Paul Swangard. "The uniforms, I think, more than anything else," said the managing director of the university's Warsaw Sports Marketing Center, "are probably the key ingredient."
And not to Tinker Hatfield. "What is a more visible way to turn up the heat and create a personality," the famous Nike designer said, "than through the football uniforms?"3
Oregon clearly is the beneficiary of its unique relationship with Nike boss Phil Knight, a 1959 alum who has used his fortune to give the Ducks every potential material advantage. But the most consistently conspicuous portion of Knight's lavish contributions are the team's much-discussed uniforms — the yellows and the greens, the blacks and the grays, the highlighter neons and the stormtrooper whites, the many different helmets and jerseys and pants and socks and shoes, the more than 500 possible combinations in all.
The football Ducks of Oregon are something new. They didn't get people to watch because they got good. They got good because they got people to watch. They are college sports' undisputed champions of the 21st century's attention economy.
The school's been playing the sport, mostly badly, since 1894. But then it made the 1995 Rose Bowl. And then it made the 1996 Cotton Bowl.4
The Ducks lost both those games, but this, according to the creation tale,5 was enough to interest Knight. His company made so much money from the mid-'80s to the mid-'90s that smart people started writing books about what it was doing. Nike, the authors agreed, was a new kind of company in a new kind of world. The sneaker behemoth based in Beaverton, Ore., was selling packaging as much as it was selling products.
"Nike is not a production company," Robert Goldman and Stephen Papson wrote in Nike Culture: The Sign of the Swoosh. It "designs, develops and markets the branded goods."
"The whole thing happens on TV now," Knight said in 1993. "The final game of the NCAA basketball tournament is better than any runway in Paris for launching a shoe. Kids climb up next to the screen to see what the players are wearing."6
So after the Cotton Bowl loss, Knight asked the Ducks' coach a question, and he asked Nike's designers a question.
He asked the coach: What do you need from me?
He asked the designers: How can we make teenagers who are good at football want to come to the University of Oregon?7
About a year later, on the other side of the country, the head of a think tank and a visiting scholar at Berkeley's Center for Research on Social Change gave a wonky talk at a conference in Cambridge, Mass. "We are headed," Michael H. Goldhaber said,8 "into what I call the attention economy."9
Economics is the study of the allocation of resources that are scarce. These days, more and more, information isn't scarce. Stuff isn't scarce. What's scarce is attention. The companies that win in an attention economy are those that win the eyeballs of people who have too much to look at. Too many ads. Too many screens in too many places. Too many games on too many channels on too many days of the week.
"This new economy," Goldhaber said in Cambridge in January 1997, "is based on endless originality.
"If you have enough attention," he added, "you can get anything you want."
John C. Beck cowrote a book called The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business. "Just go back to what gets attention in the animal world," he said.10 One thing is fear. Another thing is bright colors.
"If attention is now at the center of the economy rather than stuff, then so is style," UCLA professor Richard Lanham wrote in The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information. "It moves from the periphery to the center. Style and substance trade places.
"Push style to the extreme," Lanham wrote, "and it becomes substance."11
The answer Knight got from the coach was an indoor practice facility. The coach got that and more. Since then, Knight has spent some $300 million on stadium additions, luxury boxes, and palatial locker rooms. All of these things obviously are on the list of reasons Oregon's football team got good.12
But back in Beaverton, the Nike designers did their part, using the Ducks program as part laboratory, part showroom.
Blocky, standard letters became sleek, modern fonts. Wings on the shoulders? Diamond designs on the knees? Silver shoes worn at Southern Cal? "Nothing," Nike creative director Todd Van Horne said, "is off the table." The paint for the dark green helmets was made with glass beads and cost $2,400 a gallon. There were fall fashion shows.
"They look hatched from an alien pod," Bachman wrote in the Oregonian, "sent to Earth to seek first downs and souvenir sales."13
This, Michael Smith wrote in the SportsBusiness Journal, was part of "Nike's 15-year project to build Oregon football into a national power largely on the strength of marketing and branding."14
Tradition? Tradition is great where it's a sellable, marketable commodity. Alabama can sell tradition. Penn State can sell tradition. Michigan can sell tradition. At those places, tradition is the differentiation, but at the schools where it's not? They have to go in the opposite direction. And no one has done that better, or more consciously, than Nike and Oregon, which for the purposes of this conversation are essentially one and the same. Oregon's tradition at this point is the overtly embraced lack of tradition. Change.
"We wanted to be out there, to be purposely controversial," Hatfield told Smith. "That's a part of what we do that's not very well understood. A lot of the sports writers at first hated it" — fans, too, by the way, and still do — "and that's actually what we wanted. If you're purposely trying to stir up the nest and increase visibility, you want them saying something."
"It's probably the easiest way for Oregon to cut through the clutter of college football, to be undeniably known for something," Swangard said. "If no one knows your product exists, there is no demand for your product, and at the end of the day it's about 18-year-old kids. The uniforms are the key ingredient to getting those bodies there, and the bodies are what win you football games."
Like LeGarrette Blount, from faraway Perry, Fla.
"The uniforms are awesome," he said in 2008 when he was asked why he wanted to go all the way to the Pacific Northwest to play football.15
Like LaMichael James, from Texarkana, Texas.
"I loved the uniforms," he said before the 2010 Rose Bowl, "and then I got to know more about Oregon."16 And then he became a Heisman Trophy finalist for the Ducks.
Kids.
Climb up next to the screen.
To see what the players are wearing.
The past couple of years, as the Ducks were making their way to the Rose Bowl and their first no. 1 national ranking and then this past January's national championship game, which they lost to Auburn on a field goal with two seconds left, more teams around the country started wearing uniforms that made them look like … Oregon. West Virginia and Virginia Tech. Miami and Boise and TCU. Now Arizona State and Oklahoma State and Wyoming.17
Nike's designers are still working. The evolution is ongoing. All those other schools? They won't look like Oregon for long.
Watch.
Michael Kruse is a staff writer at the St. Petersburg Times and a contributing writer for Grantland. Follow him on Twitter at @michaelkruse.
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