DUCKS HAVE A

Oregon in Final Four

GLENDALE, Ariz. — It’s one thing to have Nike as a sponsor. It’s quite another to have the owner of Nike as your No. 1 fan.

After a 78-year absence from college basketball’s biggest stage, Oregon is at the Final Four this week. For a good deal of this success, the Ducks can thank Nike’s billionaire owner, Phil Knight — the man who keeps the money flowing into the hoops program, and all the rest of the sports, too.

One of Knight’s most recent, and benevolent, gifts to Oregon was a $100 million donation to help fund the school’s opulent basketball arena, named after Knight’s late son, Matthew.

“Phil Knight and Nike have essentially created a lab at the University of Oregon,” said David Carter, executive director of the Sports Business Institute at Southern California’s Marshall School of Business. “The students welcome that. As long as the programs perform well and stay out of trouble, it’s rinse and repeat.”

Among the other beneficiaries of Knight’s largesse: The football team, which has played for the national title twice this decade; and the men’s and women’s track teams, which have combined for 13 indoor and outdoor NCAA titles since 2010.

All this after Oregon spent decades playing in the second division of the Pac-12 and in relative obscurity in the college town of Eugene, population 160,000.

“It’s not a booming metropolis,” Carter said. “But every team in the conference has something to hang its hat on. At Oregon, their hat is a Nikebranded hat.”

He’s hardly one-dimensional: Knight also recently contributed $500 million to build Oregon’s applied sciences research center, one-upping himself on the $400 million he gave to Stanford, where he studied business, to establish a grad-school scholarship program.

But his biggest footprint has come in sports, where the company he cofounded five-plus decades ago is a leader in dozens of areas, not the least of which are basketball shoes and apparel.

No surprise, then, that it was Oregon that first took a chance with a wideranging palette of get-your-sunglassesout uniforms, all in neon-shaded hues of the school colors — green and gold. These days, dozens of schools feature those sort of uniforms.

“You can’t market the players, you can only market the program,” marketing expert Joe Favorito said. “They recognized that those bright and unique colors help connect to the younger audience.”

Knight, whom Nike officials said was not giving interviews this week, is hardly alone as a big-name, big-money donor at a major school.