This is Oregon football. There is a barbershop with utensils from Milan. And a duck pond. And a locker room that can be accessed by biometric thumbprints. And chairs upholstered with the same material found in a Ferrari’s interior. And walls covered in football leather.
Nike football leather, naturally.
The Football Performance Center, which was unveiled publicly this week, is as much country club as football facility, potentially mistaken for a day spa, or an art gallery, or a sports history museum, or a spaceship — and is luxurious enough to make N.F.L. teams jealous. It is, more than anything, a testament to college football’s arms race, to the billions of dollars at stake and to the lengths that universities will go to field elite football programs.
The performance center was paid for through a donation from Phil Knight, a founder of Nike, an Oregon alum and a longtime benefactor of the university. During a tour of the facility Wednesday, university officials declined to give a dollar figure, even a ballpark one, insisting they did not know the total cost of a football center where even the garbage cans were picked with great care to match the overall design. (Early design estimates placed the facility cost at $68 million, which, based on the tour, seemed conservative.)The tour lasted more than three hours and covered the full 145,000 square feet of the facility (with 60,000 additional square feet of parking). Nike and its relationship with Oregon is obvious early and throughout. One small logo outside the Ducks’ locker room featured the university’s mascot, wearing a top hat adorned with a dollar sign. Oregon football is often viewed through that lens by outsiders, who derisively have christened Oregon as Nike University.
“We are the University of Nike,” said Jeff Hawkins, the senior associate athletic director of football administration and operations. “We embrace it. We tell that to our recruits.”
by Greg Bishop, NY Times | Read more:
Images: Cliff Volpe for The New York Times
