The 500 Uniforms of the Oregon Ducks

Dear PDX sports fans: Finished steaming about the Timbers Army and trying to preserve a few fingernails before Saturday's Duck matchup against LSU? (It's the portion of the Ducks not suspended vs. the portion of LSU not under arrest!) You could find worse ways to kill a few nervous minutes than reading this Grantland consideration of Phil Knight's sartorial role in the University of Oregon's rise to glory. Little in it will surprise diehards—and the idea that the Ducks are winners because they're snappy dressers has been argued before—but this piece has a little more theoretical flair:

The football Ducks of Oregon are something new. They didn't get people to watch because they got good. They got good because they got people to watch. They are college sports' undisputed champions of the 21st century's attention economy.

Then it namechecks Marshall McLuhan and cites a professor saying, "Push style to the extreme and it becomes substance." The piece is like...I dunno, college or something.

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