Oregon Ducks

Flash, speed, continuity helped build Oregon brand

Published Jul. 1, 2015 2:21 p.m. ET

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How do you go about building a college football powerhouse from scratch? Is it coaching? Money? Facilities? Uniforms?

Well, according to a spectacular piece by Sport Illustrated's Andy Staples, the Oregon Ducks perfected the process of building a college football brand. How did they do it? We'll let Mr. Staples explain:

"How did Oregon build a perennial national title contender in a remote, sparsely populated state? By building a readily identifiable brand of football that draws 18-year-old athletes like moths to light reflected off a “liquid metal” helmet. But this brand wasn’t built by the marketing department or by a consultant. The staff at Nike, one of the best brand-building companies in America, had a hand in the process, but the people most responsible were the coaches and the players. Like anything else, a football team’s brand is mostly defined—for better or for worse—by the quality of the product.

In Oregon’s case, Nike’s uniform designs and technological advances are vital components. But so is the blur offense created by former coach Chip Kelly and refined by successor Mark Helfrich and coordinator Scott Frost. And the most important factor is a culture that has remained intact through three coaching changes over 20 years. Those three pieces—flash, speed and continuity—turned Oregon football from a quaint operation on the edge of the country to America’s coolest program. How strong is Oregon’s brand? All it takes is one glimpse of the signature O and a fan or recruit knows exactly how the team looks and plays.

Oregon had even less to work with when it began building its brand. Given all the factors working against them, the Ducks should not have been able to do what they did. In a study published in 2008 in the Journal of Sports Economics, researchers found that the best predictor of which college a blue-chip football recruit will attend is proximity to the recruit’s hometown. And how many such players did the state of Oregon produce between ’10 and ’14? Twenty-six. Florida yielded 810 in that span. Yes, Oregon borders California (481 signees between ’10 and ’14). But Eugene is an eight-hour drive from the Bay Area; Californians have much closer options. “Three things, when you look at why prospective student-athletes choose a place, are distance from home—which is a challenge for us—winning and having a platform,” Helfrich says. “We think we have a pretty good hold on two of those three. The first one you can’t affect. We’re not going to move the campus.”

So Oregon had to create a program that players wanted to fly over other schools to reach. Running backs coach Gary Campbell, who joined Rich Brooks’s staff in 1983 and never left, believes the rebranding truly began in the late ’80s, when Brooks and his staff began recruiting the players who would win the 1994 Pac‑10 title, Oregon’s first since 1957. A taste of winning helped. So did acting athletic director Dan Williams, who promoted offensive coordinator Mike Bellotti to coach when Brooks left to lead the St. Louis Rams in ’95. Bellotti kept assistants such as Campbell, linebackers coach Don Pellum and strength coach Jim Radcliffe.

No uniform design ever won a game, though. “If you put a dog in a shiny helmet, he’s still a dog,” Helfrich says. The Ducks began to play as stylishly as they dressed in 2006 when Bellotti asked offensive coordinator Gary Crowton to experiment with the spread. That spring Crowton invited Kelly to share some of the innovative schemes he had come up with while working as New Hampshire’s offensive coordinator. The Oregon staff liked Kelly so much that when Crowton left for LSU after the ’06 season, Bellotti hired Kelly to run the Ducks’ offense."

Oregon's meteoric rise has changed the way college football looks forever. The only step left for the Ducks is to bring home a national title. Will it happen this year?

(h/t Sports Illustrated)

Photo Credit: Rob Tringali - Getty Images