How Oregons uniforms went from fledgling concept to creative college football force

May 2024 · 15 minute read

In the middle of the season, late in a game against No. 2 UCLA, Reuben Droughns broke.

It just happened. At one moment, Droughns was fine. He was a powerful 6-foot, 210-pounder who had played two years of junior college football before joining the team at the University of Oregon in 1998. The Ducks were 5-0 that season, and much of that came on the back of Droughns, who had rushed for 200 or more yards in three games. He was well on his way again when he took a handoff from Oregon’s 35 yard line, cut to the right sideline and crumpled, untouched, to the turf at the UCLA 45. He had reached 172 yards on the day and 824 on the season, numbers that would remain as the tailback was diagnosed with a broken right fibula.

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That broken leg was part of the reason Droughns ended up on a beach in Hawaii that December, clad in a then-futuristic-looking uniform that looked more black than green and wearing a helmet that appeared to change colors as it caught light reflecting off the Waikiki waves.

This 1998 photoshoot, held just days before the Aloha Bowl, wasn’t about the present. Oregon wouldn’t even wear the uniforms until the next season. When the Ducks played Colorado days later on Christmas, they wore their familiar Kelly green and yellow with helmets displaying “UO” interlocking on both sides. They lost 51-43 to the Buffaloes, yet everything was already pointing to the future.

Especially Droughns. Not playing in the game due to injury, Droughns and injured linebacker Peter Sirmon instead got to serve as the first in what would be a long line of Oregon Nike models. The colors they wore had names like “Spruce” green and “Lightning” yellow. The new “O” on the helmet was developed as an homage to the track at Hayward Field, and talk of the uniform technology went on and on and on.

“There’s no loose jersey for them to grab. It’s durable and it even feels fast,” Droughns said that afternoon. “When we come out in a bunch looking like this, it’ll be intimidating.”

In the years since Droughns and Sirmon modeled the first collaboration between Nike and the Ducks, Oregon and uniforms have become synonymous. The Ducks have worn black and green and yellow and pink and blue. They’ve worn uniforms designed by children’s hospital patients, chose not to wear team colors in the national title game and once even had uniforms that actually resembled a duck, with orange socks and facemasks. Think pieces have been written, clicks have been generated and, frankly, plenty of fans have been agitated by the discussion of just what the Oregon Ducks are going to wear each week.

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Love it or hate it, it’s part of what Oregon is now. It’s part of what college football is now.

But this was all new in 1999 when the Ducks released the first generation of what would grow into the machine it is today. The Ducks wore just two uniforms that season. Two. And even then Mike Bellotti was getting hate mail for it.

“The helmet change was one of the most amazing things. People were still fired up about it because it was a change, but it was so beautiful and striking,” Bellotti said. “With the jerseys? ‘Oh my God. Why did you do that?’ I took so much crap about that. I asked boosters, ‘When was the last time you put on a jersey?’ They couldn’t answer that. And for former players it had been 20 or 30 years. So I go, ‘You know what? These kids nowadays like it.’ Everything I did was based on what the players liked.”

The answer to why he did it was actually pretty easy for Bellotti. He and Bill Moos became head coach and athletic director at Oregon prior to the 1995 season. The Ducks were beginning to show signs of life in the Pac-10, having reached the Rose Bowl in the 1994 season and backing up that season with a 9-2 record and a Cotton Bowl berth.

Then the Ducks got stomped 38-6, with Rick Neuheisel and Colorado adding insult to injury with a fake punt late in the fourth quarter that led to a touchdown.

“We got massacred, and it was a nasty day,” Moos, now the Nebraska athletic director, remembers. “We’re trying to get out through the tunnel and the Colorado players were trying to get through there and there was tension because they had run a fake punt. And the Colorado players were just laughing and going ‘Quack, quack, quack’ because we had the Donald Duck as our logo.

“That angered me, and that’s when I started to think we needed to be respected in this modern era of college football, and our look had to be a big part of it.”

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Oregon would soon take drastic steps to become that modern program, and it’s no secret that much of the momentum arose from Nike co-founder and Oregon alum Phil Knight’s ignited interest following the success of 1994. In October 1995, talks of an apparel deal between the school and company broke. At the time, Nike had contracts with Alabama, Miami, Michigan, North Carolina, Penn State and USC.

“We need to be mentioned in the same breath with those universities,” Moos said in 1995, “and we should be mentioned in the same breath with them.”

The Cotton Bowl was the first time Oregon wore Nike-made jerseys, and moving forward, Knight was invested in the success of the program. For Bellotti, the most important thing was securing an indoor practice facility. Knight wrote a check and a year and a half later, the Moshofsky Center was born.

But if Bellotti wanted to field nationally competitive teams, he knew he had to expand his recruiting footprint. Oregon had won just three bowl games in school history, was rarely on national television and was an afterthought in a conference that had powers such as Washington and USC. The indoor practice field was great for keeping players on campus once they visited, but Bellotti needed something to get his foot in the door. And he knew the power of uniforms. He learned that during the Civil War in 1995. That day the Ducks went out for their typical pre-game warmups at Autzen Stadium and came back to the locker room for a surprise: new uniforms.

“When you watch kids at Christmas, when you see how excited they get, I mean, really that was it,” Bellotti said. “It’s not easy to get a whole new set of helmets and a whole new set of jerseys back then, but that sort of sparked something in me. Sometimes you forget — as an old football coach, you just say to wear whatever we put out there. But then you notice it does make a difference. So as we wanted to evolve from a very regional recruiting power to a national recruiting power, we talked to people.”

Those people? The people at Nike. And they had a question for Bellotti and Moos.

“It was Phil Knight and Todd Van Horne and Tinker Hatfield,” Bellotti recalled. “And they said to me, ‘What do you think about changing the basic colors of the uniform?’”

Since changing its name from Blue Ribbon Sports to Nike in 1971, the Beaverton, Oregon-based company’s logo featured two things: Its iconic swoosh and the company’s name. 

That was until Nike made a bold decision in 1995. 

“We as a brand moved from our branding with ‘Nike’ and the swoosh to just the swoosh,” said Van Horne, Nike’s creative director for apparel. “That was a powerful branding move at the time, that you could communicate so much faster than words of who your brand is and people recognized it.” 

The simplified rebrand caught the eye of Pat Bowlen, the then-owner of the Denver Broncos. At the time, Denver had its longtime “Orange Crush” uniforms, the ones that sported a large “D” with a bronco busting through on the helmet. Bowlen wanted a rebrand, and Van Horne was tabbed as at the creative lead. 

At the time, NFL uniform technology was relatively simplistic with “breathable mesh” serving as the premier technological innovation. In taking on the Broncos project, Nike had two goals: To make a better uniform for football than its competitors and to transform Denver’s brand into something instantly recognizable. 

“No thought had been put into stretch materials, articulation of joints, range of motion or anything other than ‘Here’s a porthole mesh to let the players breathe,’” Van Horne said. “Our first approach — if you look at the way shoulder pads worked back in that uniform design — that was the first real innovation in a football jersey in terms of lycra stretch panels improving the way the shoulders moved, and that led to different color blocking options that we were able to bring to the uniform.” 

Once Nike had its base “performance chassis,” as Van Horne called it, it could move on to the branding. 

The Broncos rolled out the uniforms prior to the 1997 season. 

“I think a lot of fans have been prepared to hate the change,” then-safety Steve Atwater told The Gazette-Telegraph of Colorado Springs. “But now that everything is available for everybody to see, I hope people will look for themselves and make up their own mind. I think it’s a change for the better.

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“Navy blue looks meaner than orange.”

Then the Broncos won back-to-back Super Bowls their first two years in the uniforms and have worn them ever since. 

“It was after that project that we heard, ‘Wow, if you can do this with the Denver Broncos, why don’t you bring that type of innovation to our backyard partner the Oregon Ducks?” said Van Horne, now Nike’s director for creative apparel. 

“It was popular with the youth of the day and especially the athletes,” said Moos. “Nike was going to do it somewhere, and they offered it to us and we jumped on it.” 

What followed were long meetings with Nike’s thinktank. The first project was the logo. At the time Oregon had a bit of a branding issue with multiple logos ranging from the interlocking “UO” to the Donald Duck that debuted in the 1940s. Van Horne recalls that Hatfield, now Nike’s vice president for design and creative projects, believed that Oregon needed one logo.

“It’s that branding 101: When your brand has multiple symbols or languages, it really creates confusion. Nobody knows exactly what you stand for,” Van Horne said. “When you rally around one symbol that has a story behind it and is unique in history, people recognize that symbol, and the power of that reputation is branding equity.” 

They ultimately settled on the single O — the inside was patterned in the shape of Hayward Field, Oregon’s first football home, and the outside resembled its current home of Autzen Stadium.

“I remember sitting down with Phil and he said something that I’ve kept and used throughout the rest of my career: You don’t need a sign on the Eiffel Tower,” Moos said. “When you see the Eiffel Tower, you don’t need a sign saying it’s the Eiffel Tower. That’s where we came from with that O. When you see that O now, that’s Oregon.”

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Then it was time to toy with the world’s perception of “green.” Oregon had long worn a bright green, the type of green that felt like springtime, the kind of green seen on budding leaves or in the fields that populate the Willamette Valley. That green was going away, and in its place was something new. Something darker. Something sprucier.

“Nike sells on a national and international basis, and they said they believed it needed to be a darker color,” Bellotti said. “They said it just resonates better. It shows more strength and all this stuff. So I said we’d talk about it and that I wanted to get the players involved. So we actually had a group of players, about 15 or 20 kids on this committee to look at the uniforms and what Nike could present and what might be exciting.

“That stuff took about a year, and they sent me some pictures that looked like Spiderman on steroids. I really mean that.”

Spider … duck? (Courtesy Mike Bellotti)

The final product was a bit tamer than the Spiderman rendering that Bellotti still has framed on a wall. What really turned heads was the helmet. Inspired by the way a duck’s feathers change color in the sunlight, Nike introduced helmets that used color-changing paint to replicate the phenomena. Getting the look just right was an arduous process that didn’t exactly sit well with helmet manufacturers.

“I think they were fearful that Nike was going to get into the helmet business and become a competitor of theirs,” Van Horne said. “The helmet color changing so it looked like a mallard duck was such a unique storyline that we just had to find a way to solve it because it was something that had never been done on a helmet before. It had been basically just flat paint and everything else was decals. This was doing something that was more familiar with the automotive world and applying it to a uniform. 

“That was one of the first symbols. The helmet and the helmet look became part of the Oregon brand and that of course has evolved into new helmets and colors and finishes and chrome and you name it. We’ve tried just about everything.”

The uniforms were ready by the end of the 1998 season, and Bellotti wanted to debut them before the Aloha Bowl so Oregon would get a headline heading into the recruiting season. The response in living rooms across the nation?

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“‘Oh yeah! You’re the ones with the cool helmets,’” Bellotti recalled.

The response at home?

“When we broke it out the following season, that’s the closest to getting run out of town that I’ve ever been,” Moos said. “The traditional fans thought we looked like a bunch of Ninja Turtles.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” wrote Greg Jayne in the Statesman Journal of Salem. “It’s not as if Oregon’s hip new uniforms are the end of football as we know it. That fans will grow to love them.

“It’s just that you don’t see USC and Washington making drastic changes in their uniforms. If Oregon had the big-time program it professes to have, national recognition and merchandise sales will take care of themselves.”

Bellotti and Moos’ goal was never to appease writers like Jayne. And though no program sets out to alienate its fan base, the two men also understood that Oregon had the opportunity to start doing something unique. If the jerseys led to more exposure and more exposure led to better players and better players led to more wins, who would be upset?

“It was the diehard Duck fans who had sat in Autzen when there were 15,000 people in there and they’re sitting in the rain,” Moos said. “Those were Ducks and that’s how they look and that’s Dan Fouts and Mel Renfro and Ahmad Rashad — when he was Bobby Moore — and that was the look in the 1995 Rose Bowl. It was the first one in 34 years. Those got us to the Rose Bowl. They can’t be that bad.”

Oregon’s wardrobe is so well-stocked these days, it never has to wear the same uniform twice. (Abbie Parr / Getty Images)

Bellotti’s biggest concern was the play on the field. They could wear the fanciest uniforms under the stars, he would remind his team, and it didn’t mean anything if they weren’t competitive. But whether it was the momentum of the uniforms or the play generating headlines for the uniforms, that wasn’t a problem in 1999. The Ducks went 9-3 that season and won a Sun Bowl. Then they were Pac-10 co-champions in 2000 with a Holiday Bowl win. And by 2001, Oregon was one of the best teams in the country and there stood Joey Harrington, towering on a $250,000 billboard outside of Madison Square Garden, wearing spruce green in a headline-grabbing Heisman campaign.

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“He’s 14 stories tall in Manhattan in that uniform with his number three, and by then our fans go, ‘That’s our look,’ and everyone else wanted to copy it,” Moos said. “It was ours first.”

Oregon added to the look in 2003 with an all-yellow alternate uniform. Then came the steel plate era of the mid-2000s and then, eventually, the winged shoulder look that many Oregon fans are so fond of today.

Bellotti has a story about that one. It was 2008, his last season as head coach before handing the reins off to Chip Kelly. The Ducks were loaded with talent — the year before they were national title contenders until quarterback Dennis Dixon injured his knee — and were facing Arizona at home on a November afternoon. Taking a page from the 1995 playbook, Bellotti sent his players out for warmups in their regular steel/tread plate uniforms from that season. Then when they came back into the locker room, Bellotti once again had Christmas morning laid out for them: new black helmets and new black jerseys adorned with the gladiator-like winged pattern on the shoulders.

“Once they saw those, they went crazy,” Bellotti said. “I mean, literally. At this point they had gotten new jerseys and all this other stuff, but when I let them go on the field chasing the motorcycle, they ran for two or three laps around the field and the fans were going nuts and I thought they were going to get worn out.”

Oregon won that game 55-45 and finished the season with a Holiday Bowl win against No. 13 Oklahoma State.

Wrote Brian Libby, then the visual arts critic at The Oregonian in Portland: “Over two decades the University of Oregon’s football program has transformed from a perennial loser to year-in-year-out winner. This season the Ducks will attend their 16th bowl game in 20 years after previously going more than a quarter-century without any postseason appearances.

“But a less favorable trait hounds Mike Bellotti’s team today: Oregon is the laughingstock of uniforms.”

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Bellotti still remembers that one.

“The fashion editor of The Oregonian wrote a bad article about me and my choices for the fake wings,” he said. “And I’m going, ‘Well, if that’s the worst that can happen, I’ll be OK.’ ”

(Top photo of Reuben Droughns in 1999: Otto Greule Jr. / Allsport)

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