When the Oklahoma State Cowboys traveled to the Oregon Ducks in week two this season, it was a match-up of programs with two of the most historical sugar daddies in the annals of college football. Long before the era of NIL (Name, Image and Likeness) money was ushered in, the University of Oregon was synonymous with Nike Founder Phil Knight (UO class of ’59, member of the track & field team) while Oklahoma State was inextricably linked with the late hedge fund owner and business magnate T. Boone Pickens (OSU, then Oklahoma A&M, class of ’51). Then Ok. St. coach Mike Gundy got into a war of words with Ducks head coach Dan Lanning heading into that game, and we asked Oregon men’s basketball coach Dana Altman about this topic at Big Ten Basketball Media Day.
Oklahoma State fired Gundy, a member of the state’s sports hall of fame, one week after his Cowboys were trounced at Oregon 69-3.
Heading into that shellacking, Gundy gave multiple interviews where he discussed how large the Oregon budget is for NIL, claiming that the Ducks had spent $40 million on their roster in 2024.
He went on to say that there are college football coaches (presumably including himself) who believe that Oregon, and other programs at their financial level, should schedule non-conference games against each other, instead of against teams with smaller budgets.
It came off like a pre-emptive excuse, especially after such a lopsided loss. Lanning responded to this ahead of the blowout victory on Sept. 6.
“If you want to be a top 10 team in college football, you’d better be invested in winning,” he said. “And we spend to win. Some people save to have an excuse for why they don’t.”
As the head coach of Oregon’s other revenue-generating sport, we brought this topic up to Altman and asked him about the significance of having donors like Phil Knight, and his family, positively impacting the Oregon athletics program.
“It’s meant a lot,” Altman said in an exclusive with The Sports Bank.
“Our whole thing to have Mr. And Mrs. Knight supporting our program and others to compete at a small university.
“You look at the big 10 universities, they’re a lot bigger than us, a lot of us, Nebraska, probably with 20-25,000 students. You compare us to other universities with 50 and 60,000 students, we have to have some people that are really behind us (in order) to compete at that level.”
The University of Oregon’s Fall 2024 enrollment was 24,462 students, including 20,626 undergraduates and 3,836 graduates. Ohio State’s enrollment, by comparison, is about 66,000.
However, the University of Oregon’s endowment is $1.63 billion, and they operate on a budget of $1.45 billion.
Knight and his wife Penny have made numerous notable donations over the years, including $500 million in 2016 to establish the Phil and Penny Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact.
We asked Altman about the resources that the Knight family provide.
“It’s special,” responded Altman, who has taken Oregon to four sweet 16s, two Elite Eights and one Final Four.
“But everybody thinks it’s just athletics, and it’s not. He just gave 2 billion for cancer research at the med school, and we got a new research building on campus.
“Then he funds the Knight library, I mean his footprints are throughout the state.”
The $2 billion donation to Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU)’s Knight Cancer Institute was made in August, and it is reportedly the largest single donation ever made to a U.S. university.
The Knight library system is the largest research collection in the state of Oregon.
In pointing out how, typically, only the sporting facility donations receive media attention, not the scientific and academic facilities, Altman responded: “which is a shame, because of everything that he and penny do for the state.”
The latest estimates from Forbes value Phil Knight’s net worth at $32.8 billion. We also asked Oregon guard Jackson Shelstad about this topic at Media Days.
“We’re very thankful for what he’s done for the University of Oregon,” Shelstad responded.
“And obviously it’s a fortunate time right now, for college athletes to make money, so we’re just thankful for him and everything.”
After being obliterated by Oregon, Gundy did back track a little, and provide more of an explanation to his commentary on the University’s financial resources.
“A little bit of that was was taken out of context,” Gundy said. “The truth of the matter is, I was being very complimentary of Oregon and their commitment.
“The other things that had been said that day were that they made a huge commitment to facilities, as we know.
“They’ve made a huge commitment to their staff, they’ve made a huge commitment to their surrounding staff and then, they’ve made a huge NIL commitment.
“The thing that people have to understand is I’m very, very appreciative of what we’ve done here at Oklahoma State. Our administration is trying and doing everything they can to facilitate us in the NIL window.
“You hear the term ‘donor fatigue,’ I can only imagine the donors across the country at maybe other than, what, 12, 15, 18 schools.
“Continuing to ask for more money is extremely difficult. But the truth of the matter is this – and what Dan said is exactly right. Everything he said is true in the fact that it’s a different time and it’s a tremendous strain on universities and donors.”
Dana Altman and his Oregon Ducks open the season against Hawaii at Matthew Knight Arena (yes, the Knight family) on November 4th.
Paul M. Banks is the Founding Editor of The Sports Bank. He’s also the author of “Transatlantic Passage: How the English Premier League Redefined Soccer in America,” and “No, I Can’t Get You Free Tickets: Lessons Learned From a Life in the Sports Media Industry.”
He currently contributes to USA Today’s NFL Wires Network. His past bylines include the New York Daily News, Sports Illustrated and the Chicago Tribune. His work has been featured in numerous outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, the Washington Post and ESPN. You can follow him on Linked In and Twitter