As someone who has followed the Oregon Ducks football since the end of the Rich Brooks era in the first half of the 90s it’s a little weird to me how much the national profile of the team has risen in stature over the past 20 years. If I travel across the country I now see Oregon Ducks apparel rather regularly. As someone from Oregon I used to ask these people if they were perhaps from Oregon, but after one too many instances where it turns out the person has never even been to the state and has no connection aside from the jersey, I’ve stopped doing that. For example, last year I was in Texas around the new year, and saw a guy with an Oregon sweatshirt, and asked him if he was from Oregon. He smiled bashfully and told me he’d gotten the jersey recently, since he was an Aggies fan.
An article in The New York Times Upshot blog uses Facebook data to illustrate this new normal pretty clearly. Not only does Oregon overwhelm the Pac-12 map, being the second or third preference across much of the West, but it’s expanding across the northern Great Plains. It’s even the first choice in one county in Minnesota. I hope Phil Knight is happy.
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