When you go to a national championship game, you bring everyone with you.
That’s why there was hand-ringing yesterday when Nike unveiled Oregon’s national title game uniforms.
The look is slick and appealing, but also white and sliver and black. Green and yellow, the school’s colors, and Donald Duck and the O, the school’s identities, will both be missing in action in front of the biggest audience the university has ever had.
Oregon, with the higher ranking, is the designated home team. They could have worn home uniforms, like the ones they sported against Florida State in the Rose Bowl.
But Nike gets what Nike wants, and so the Ducks trot out the new away unis, and the Ohio State Buckeyes get to wear their famous scarlet and gray.
Oregon has followed an unwritten rule since the dawn of the Chip Kelly era in 2009 that says the team can’t wear the same uniform combination twice in a single season, and the Ducks’ national championship threads are still space-age.
The difference is, on Monday, Oregon won’t be trying to win a football game and sell 18-year-old high school recruits. They’ll be representing an entire state and community, and trying to make them proud.
Remember Oregon’s first trip to the national championship game? It was four years ago in Glendale, Arizona against Auburn.
I don’t remember so much about the game.
There are some fuzzy images. Casey Matthews, for instance, coming from nowhere to punch the ball and the game-clinching drive out of Cam Newton’s hands in the fourth quarter,
There is Jeff Maehl hauling in a miraculous two-point conversion catch to tie the game, and Michael Dyer rolling over the stomach of Eddie Pleasant and setting up the game winning field goal.
I more remember when the flags started popping up on cars around town. I remember when the family members and peers who I thought didn’t know a first-down from an onside kick started questioning play calling.
I remember the full-page ads and congratulations in the newspaper. The billboards adding “Go Ducks!” all over the state.
Speaking of uniforms, when the Ducks’ look was unveiled in late 2010, it made the front page of The Oregonian.
The uniform, that is.
The best description of sports fandom I’ve ever heard came from the owner of a woman’s professional softball team.
He told me, sports fandom is all about civic pride. Sometimes it’s about my town is better than your town, but more often it’s about I love my town, and we’re all together on this. It’s about community.
That core sentiment is what makes the World Cup and the Olympics such bonanzas, and it’s the start of everything positive sports can do for people.
Oregon taps into that in Arlington on Monday.
Of course, the feeling locally isn’t as euphoric as it was in 2010. That’s understandable. The Ducks are expected to be here.
They’ve been the best team in college football since they lost to Arizona, and it hasn’t even been close. They mauled Florida State in Pasadena, and if the game had gone five quarters instead of four, the margin of victory would have been close to sixty points.
The only team that’s been close to Oregon in the middle and latter stages of the season has been Ohio State, who underwent a similar transformation after losing to Virginia Tech in week two.
The Buckeyes have the kind of talent that took down Alabama, and that just a few weeks after pasting the Wisconsin team that beat Auburn in the Outback Bowl 59-0 in the Big Ten Championship game.
This game should be a high-scoring classic that sparks and early and often in a way that the Auburn game never was. It was Ohio State, remember, that handed Oregon its first clinic on what they needed to do to reach college football elite status when they manhandled the high-flying Ducks in the 2009 Rose Bowl.
The Ducks are trying to finish the job that the 2009 team started the 2007 team almost finished, and the 2010 team came closest to realizing.
They carry those players and those moments and those memories with them to Texas. When you go to the national championship, there’s room for everyone.
These Ducks play for Chip Kelly, and Mike Bellotti and Rich Brooks before them.
Marcus Mariota will take the field, and with him in some small way will be Joey Harrington, who put Oregon quarterbacks on the map, and Dennis Dixon, who would have been the Ducks’ first Heisman winner if he didn’t tear his ACL in Tucson.
He’ll even be playing for Dan Fouts, who told Sports Illustrated, “I believe that Marcus Mariota will be the most fascinating athlete of 2015 because whoever drafts him will make the playoffs and go on to win Super Bowl 50! Do I sound like too much of a “homer”? If so … so be it and Go Ducks!”
LaMichael, LaGarrett, you name the Duck, they have some stake in this game.
Of course, these Ducks will mostly be playing for themselves, their families, and each other, as they should. This is a great team, and they better well show that next Monday night.
But when you come this far, it’s impossible not to feel the support everyone who has supported you and everyone who has come before you.
That’s why uniforms matter this week. It’s why these moments, and sports in general, are so special.
The game is Monday night. But it’s what happens around the game that is most meaningful.
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