SEATTLE – Barbara Hedges contends there is no arms race in college athletics.
“We’ve all just done what we’ve had to do in fixing up facilities,” said the athletic director at Washington.
While the university needed a new basketball arena, Hedges didn’t have to pay Rick Neuheisel $1.5 million annually to get the results he ultimately delivered, a salary that upped the ante for football coaches throughout the West.
At Ohio State, a perfectly wonderful basketball building, St. John’s Arena, was relegated to fencing, gymnastics and volleyball, for the sake of 6,000 more seats for basketball.
Its replacement seats 19,500 but also carries a price tag of $115 million and a name you can’t believe: the Value City Arena at the Jerome Schottenstein Center.
Excess in college athletics is defended as the cost of doing business, but nowhere is it more conspicuous and harder to defend than at Oregon, where they’ve recently spent $3.2 million to update the football locker room.
“The best in college football?” said Bill Moos, the school’s athletic director, repeating a question. “It is the best anywhere, including the NFL.”
The locker room cost more than the original stadium.
“We designed something that is very expensive,” Tim Canfield, who has designed the last 10 Nike Towns, told the Eugene Register-Guard.
The Huskies have a big-screen TV set in a lounge area of their football locker room. The Ducks have three 60-inch plasma TVs, two of which are rigged for Xbox games, at a cost of $15,000 each.
The Oregon locker room is two stories and has a door that will allow eight players to enter at once, a door that can open and shut at three feet per second.
Each locker has its own ventilation system to personalize perspiration. Each also has outlets for video games and the Internet, as well as a security system that is activated by a code that includes a player’s uniform number and a scan of his thumbprint.
Weight rooms and indoor practice facilities could be defended because they made players stronger and mitigated cold, wet weather.
But this 2lst-century locker room is nothing more than frivolous one-upmanship.
“We have it in high gear all the time,” said Moos, proudly. “Our vision is to stay ahead of everybody, and young people today look at the bells and whistles.
“We have to produce revenue, and you do that by retaining coaches and attracting talent. We don’t have 365 days of sunshine a year, but we do have great facilities.”
The Ducks are bodacious. They wore bright yellow uniforms to open the season on the road at Mississippi State. They continue to have their players on billboards in major cities and advertise in USA Today.
“Our uniforms have been showcased in Sports Illustrated (Lee Corso also held one up on ESPN’s “GameDay”) and whether the response is positive or negative, it is about Oregon football,” Moos said.
The Ducks’ locker room has 120 lockers (that’s $26,667 per locker), and one is reserved for Nike chairman Phil Knight (under the heading “No. 1, Knight, Hillsboro, Oregon”) even though other boosters of the program provided the funding.
Moos spearheaded a nearly $100 million expansion of the football stadium, half of which was paid for by Knight, and will soon announce the building of a basketball arena.
For years, the university subsidized athletics. Now, with a record 40,000 season-ticket holders, it doesn’t. You admire what Moos has accomplished but wonder where he’ll stop.
At the same time, the state’s educational system is under economic siege. Dorm rooms, shared by two, average 145 square feet. Class sizes have grown. Professor salaries are among the lowest in the country.
“The University of Oregon’s academic quality is declining due to chronic under funding,” wrote professor Nathan Tublitz in a letter to the Register-Guard, “while athletics revels in ultra-luxury. Faculty share tiny offices while athletes get widescreen TVs and personal ventilation systems.”
Moos sees the locker room as an investment, if not a necessity. He knows other schools will have to match or fall back, much as Washington, WSU and Oregon State did in following Oregon’s lead in building an indoor practice facility.
This time, the Ducks have gone too far, too fast. They risk alienating a faculty, and spoiling a football team.
Almost by definition, an arms race means there will be winners and losers. The Ducks are now running a race they can’t afford to lose.
The NCAA vigorously watches recruiting excess. It doesn’t control the building of facilities. The Ducks have found a loophole and jumped through it.
In this case, you can only hope others don’t follow.

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