Ducks vs. Buckeyes: Classic Culture Clash

Ducks vs. Buckeyes: Classic Culture Clash

It’s the team Nike built against a traditional rah-rah powerhouse

By Matthew Futterman in the Wall Street Journal

College football finally has its Super Bowl.

On Monday night, Oregon and Ohio State will face off at Dallas Cowboy owner Jerry Jones’s brash monument to football in America, AT&T Stadium. The venue makes the message clear: The new playoff system has transformed the game.

There’s long been big money in college football, and we have national championships every year. But this time, the college season’s finale has reached a new level of glitz, corporate branding and national TV.

After years of debate, college football introduced a four-team playoff system starting this year to augment what had been a hodgepodge of bowl games and murky rankings leading to a single championship game.

ESPN, a big supporter of the change, paid nearly $6 billion for the rights to the series through 2026. The payoff? On Jan. 1, the two semifinal games broke all-time records for shows on cable TV. Monday’s game may surpass that.

 “The college-football playoff was always the great American event that hasn’t been created yet,” said Jay Rosenstein, a former senior executive at CBS Sports. “Now it has.”

The final game features a culture clash worthy of the sport’s new story line. Oregon, the team Nike built, is a state that never met a progressive idea it didn’t like. The Ducks are about breathless offense and flash.

Ohio State is the epitome of the old-fashioned rah-rah powerhouse. Its Columbus campus may not be in Ohio’s Rust Belt, but the Buckeyes are Ohio’s team and embody the state’s stolid, blue-collar ability to fight through hard times.

On the field, Oregon has recently rewritten the playbook for winning at the college level. One statistical example: Time of possession has long been considered a key to victory, because it signals a team’s ability to control the ball and the game. Oregon’s stats by this yardstick are relatively weak—120th out of 128 teams—but no matter. They score so often that they’re frequently kicking the ball back to their reeling opponent. Oregon quarterback Marcus Mariota averaged a 10-yard gain on every pass attempt this season, tops in the nation.

Ohio State, despite its longtime conservative style, is just coming around to the high-speed world of 21st-century college football. And they are pulling it off with a third-string quarterback. As the official state motto declares, “With God, all things are possible.” Head coach Urban Meyer also helps.

Since Meyer arrived in 2012, the Buckeyes have tried to break out of their ground-and-pound game and adjust to a faster modern pace. Ohio State ran a play every 25.7 seconds this season, compared with one every 27.9 seconds in 2009. Against Alabama at the Rose Bowl, the Buckeyes played even faster, running a play every 24.1 seconds, which passes for warp speed in Ohio—if not on the West Coast.

It is impossible to understand the evolution of Oregon football without understanding the uniquely progressive environment of the state. From its timber roots, the state has evolved into “Portlandia” (“where young people go to retire”). More seriously, it has become an incubator of innovation for everything from liberal environmental and social policies to a jogging-shoe venture named Nike, the quintessence of hip marketing, cutting-edge sports branding and, it turns out, Oregon football.

In the early 1970s, then-Governor Tom McCall told outsiders: Come visit, but please don’t stay. This cheeky, antigrowth message was accompanied by a series of independent positions. Oregon became one of the first states to ban nonreturnable bottles and pull-tab cans. It decriminalized possession of small amounts of marijuana and approved physician-assisted suicide.

Long before anyone had heard of the spread offense or neon uniforms, Oregonians proved themselves receptive to new ideas about football, too. That came in handy after Rich Brooks took over the football program, which had been mostly awful since the early 1960s. Brooks arrived in 1977, produced a winning season three years later and landed the Ducks in the Independence Bowl in 1989. Five years later he won the Pac-10 and took Oregon to the Rose Bowl. Brooks began the first of a series of innovations when he installed a flexible, pass-oriented, pro-style offense, occasionally using just a single running back, adding an extra receiver and employing a shotgun formation. That went against the traditional college approach that emphasized the run, but Brooks heard few complaints.

 “There was a tradition of a certain kind of play but not a tradition of success with that play,” he said.

The success got Brooks a promotion to the NFL, and earned offensive coordinator Mike Bellotti a promotion to head coach. That’s when the real fun began. Bellotti cultivated a relationship with Nike founder Phil Knight, an Oregon native and alumnus.

Knight asked Bellotti what he needed. Bellotti said an indoor practice facility to save players from practicing in the freezing rain of the Northwest, which was scaring off potential recruits. Done, said Knight. During the past 20 years, Knight has invested more than $100 million in Oregon football, giving the program facilities which are second to none.

Steve Novick, a member of the Portland City Council, describes Knight’s largess as a kind of self-imposed tax on one very rich man. “If you throw money at problems, it actually works,” Novick said.

In the late 1990s, Bellotti and Nike started pushing the boundaries. Before long, out went Oregon’s traditional colors of staid green and yellow. In came shades of neon yellow and emerald green, mixed with black, silver, white, and metallic. Bellotti knew the old-line fans would hate it. This wasn’t about them. It was about getting teenagers and potential recruits “to recognize innovation as our brand,” he said.

In 2001, quarterback Joey Harrington became a preseason Heisman candidate. The athletic department’s Heisman campaign included a massive billboard ad near Madison Square Garden in New York. “That billboard got the attention of adults the way the uniforms got the attention of the kids,” said Harrington, who didn’t win the Heisman and is now a Fox Sports analyst.

In 2004, Bellotti got impatient. The pro-style offense he had inherited from Brooks had stalled. New defensive schemes, such as the zone blitz, where defenses could pressure the passer without becoming vulnerable to a run, had stymied Oregon’s rushing attack. The previous season the team had scored just 356 points, nearly 200 fewer than Pac-12 champion USC, finishing a middling 8-5.

Bellotti studied tapes of lesser football schools, such as Northwestern, Bowling Green and Utah, which played fast, spread its offensive weapons across the field and put the quarterback in motion on nearly every play. After caving to resistance from coaches and enduring a 5-6 season, he pressed ahead, starting to recruit players built to run the fastest, most kinetic offense college football had ever seen. The Ducks went 10-2 in 2005 and Bellotti became a hero across the state.

“I don’t think you could have pulled something like this off in a place like Michigan,” Harrington said. In fact, Rich Rodriguez failed miserably trying to lead Michigan through a similar transition from 2008-10. The maize-and-blue faithful rebelled against a brand of football they barely recognized.

Bellotti experienced nothing of the sort. “I took more flak on the uniforms than I did on the offense,” he said.

In 2007, Bellotti hired a little-known offensive coordinator from the University of New Hampshire named Chip Kelly. When Bellotti, now an analyst with ESPN, stepped down in 2009 to become Oregon’s athletic director, Kelly got the top job and made the offense even faster, a process that repeated itself when Kelly moved to the Philadelphia Eagles in 2013 and Oregon promoted Mark Helfrich to head coach.

This season the Ducks ran 1,047 offensive plays, or one play every 22 seconds. In its 59-20 beatdown of defending champion Florida State at the Rose Bowl, Oregon ran a play every 20.2 seconds, leaving the Seminole defense gasping by the third quarter. “It’s hard to endure,” Helfrich explained after the game.

Joel Klatt, the former quarterback at Colorado who now does analysis for Fox Sports, noted that Helfrich recently explained the Oregon philosophy of football in Zen language. “He said our goal is to constantly remain the same and in remaining the same to constantly evolve,” Klatt said. “That is so fitting for what Oregon is.”

‘I took more flak on the uniforms than I did on the offense.’

—Oregon’s Mike Belloti

And who they aren’t, which is Ohio State. For Ohioans, the team has long represented more than just a bunch of football players.

“These people are everybody’s sons,” said Michael White, the retired, three-term mayor of Cleveland who graduated from Ohio State in 1973. The hopes and aspirations of much of this wildly variegated state ride on the success of Ohio State football.

Urban Meyer grew up in Northeast Ohio’s Ashtabula, played football at the University of Cincinnati and coached at Bowling Green. (Later, he coached at Florida, winning two national championships in 2006 and 2008.)

Some 60% of the roster and more than half the starting lineup grew up in-state, including quarterback Cardale Jones. One of OSU’s biggest benefactors has been billionaire clothing retailer Leslie Wexner, a native Ohioan after whom the football complex is named, among other buildings.

Oregon, by contrast, started just three native Oregonians in the Rose Bowl. Mariota is from Hawaii.

For years the Buckeyes defined the classic formula of a deliberate running game and a stout defense. In 2009, when the Buckeyes won the Big Ten championship and beat the Ducks in the Rose Bowl, the team finished 104th in the nation in passing offense and ran the ball on 64% of its plays.

The running game is still there, but Meyer has his players speeding things up. Jones, the third-string quarterback, led the Buckeyes to a 59-0 win against Wisconsin in the Big Ten championship game and the Sugar Bowl triumph. He said the team wanted to make it nearly impossible for Alabama to substitute between plays and make defensive adjustments. “We wanted their guys as tired as us up front in the fourth quarter,” Jones said in an interview.

Wide receiver Evan Spencer said something no one would ever expect to hear from a Buckeye: “Our goal is always to be as fast as possible.”

Chris Spielman, a star linebacker at Ohio State in the 1980s, said the Buckeye faithful understood Meyer would modernize the team to adjust to a changing game where speed was becoming paramount. Accepting that came easily after a 6-7 season in 2011. In a state that has correctly picked the president in every election since 1964, catching the winds of change comes fairly naturally. If Ohio State was going to win in the 21st century, it needed to field a 21st-century football team.

“You get that type of guy, who already won two championships at Florida, and you get out of his way,” Spielman said.

Yet the Buckeyes do something so conservative it’s almost radical in this throw-happy era of modern college football—defend the pass. Ohio State held opponents to just 5.9 yards per pass attempt this season, tied for eighth-best in the country. Oregon tied for 38th in that category. It’s also extremely difficult to pass into the end zone against the Buckeyes, who gave up just 15 passing touchdowns all season.

Alabama quarterback Blake Sims found that out the hard way at the Sugar Bowl. With less than 10 minutes to play, the Crimson Tide had the ball on the Ohio State 23-yard line. Down by a touchdown, Sims watched his throw to the end zone settle into the arms of Ohio State safety Vonn Bell to snuff out Alabama’s best chance for a lead late in the game. Minutes later, Meyer had his 37th win with his newfangled, yet still old-fashioned Buckeyes.

—Ben Cohen contributed to this article.