The fourth-longest home sellout streak in college football. Three consecutive conference titles. Two Rose Bowl appearances. One BCS National Championship game. A charismatic and much-loved mascot and dozens of YouTube clips. These are the stats for one of the country’s most successful and fastest-growing athletic programs.
Over the past 15 or so years, the University of Oregon has transformed from Pacific Northwest pushover to pride of the West Coast, but how do you explain the speed with which the UO rose into the national spotlight?
The answer lies in Oregon’s marketing team, and behind that you find Craig Pintens.
Pintens, 37, is the athletic department’s director for marketing and public relations and is entering his second year on the job. With over 10 years of experience in college athletics and a background in sports law, he arrived on campus last fall with one mission: make Oregon THE national brand in college athletics.
At the UO, he oversees the entire marketing campaign of the athletic department as well as serving as liaison to all external business communications, including the Pac-12 Network and the department’s media partner, IMG Worldwide.@@http://www.imgworld.com/about-us.aspx@@
In his first year, he helped to continue Autzen Stadium’s sellout streak — now sitting at 86 straight games — as well as conducting a number of other ventures, including helping kick off of the UO’s division of the Pac-12 Network this past August.
“When Craig came in for his interview,” says Andy McNamara, assistant athletic director for media services, “there were four finalists, and after meeting with him specifically, I just knew that this guy has what it takes to put us over the top. Since he’s been here, we’ve been able to accelerate the process more than it had been prior to his arrival.”
A native of West Bend, Wisc., Pintens grew up around sports. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater with a degree in marketing and knew before he even graduated that his love of athletics would lead to him to working in sports.
“I thought I wanted to be a sports agent,” Pintens says. “David Falk at the time was the top agent. He was Michael Jordan’s agent, and he was a lawyer, had a marketing background and was obviously very successful, so I determined that I wanted to go to law school to try and get the legal background to be an agent.”
After enrolling in sports law at Marquette University, he realized he didn’t have the personality to be a sports agent.
“We had a sports agent come in and talk to one of our classes, and he was just a miserable human being,” he says. “And when I say miserable, I mean I thought he was going to go jump off the roof after class because that’s how unhappy he seemed with his life.”
With a fire still burning to break into the world of sports marketing, he began applying to internships at various athletic departments, including Marquette and his alma mater, Wisconsin-White Water.
After paying his dues in odd jobs at athletic departments around Wisconsin, Pintens returned to Marquette as a marketing assistant, a job that paid $1,000 a month with zero benefits. Having a background in law,@@does he have a law degree? ss: yes@@ he thought his best prospect would be as a compliance director for the Bowl Championship Series.
“I sent out a letter to every BCS compliance director and only got three responses back,” he says. “One was a phone call from Gary Gray, who works here at the Oregon athletic department.”
The conversation didn’t lead to a real job, but Gray provided him invaluable advice and left him with an overwhelming feeling of optimism. That optimism led to real jobs at Marquette, University of Texas-Pan American and LSU before landing in Eugene.
Although the structure of a national brand was built long before Pintens arrived, he has promoted the idea that Oregon is “your favorite team’s favorite team”. He and McNamara have capitalized on the social media boom of the past few years by diving headfirst into the Twitter and Facebook scene.
According to the athletic department, the Oregon Ducks Facebook page ranks seventh in “likes” of all NCAA team pages, and the department’s webpage has seen an average increase of traffic of 89 percent per year since 2008.
Their current project is the Quack Cave, a social media command center decked out for the digital age and located at the west end of Autzen Stadium.
Designed by students, for students, the Quack Cave will serve as the watchdog program of all social media surrounding the Oregon Ducks.@@see previous link@@ Pintens and McNamara initiated the project through tweets asking for student interior designers. Within minutes they received a handful of applicants, of which two UO graduate students studying in the School of Architecture and Allied Arts were chosen to decorate and design the space.
“The fact that they trusted students to design the space was so cool to me,” says Miranda Lee, one of the graduate students who helped design the Quack Cave.@@who is this? ss: will revise@@ “We asked Craig what he wanted us to do, and he pretty much gave us free reign.”
In the coming weeks, UO students chosen by Pintens and McNamara will work at the Quack Cave to monitor and promote Oregon as a national brand. They will have access to nine computer monitors with all social media outlets running at once, including two computers and two iPads ready to tweet, retweet and post everything that’s going on around Duck athletics.
“It’s a great project, and we’re hoping it will increase the dialogue between us and campus,” McNamara says. “Hopefully, we’ll have more opportunities to do these types of things, utilizing students.”
Pintens says the athletic department’s increased presence in social media has been immeasurably beneficial to the Ducks’ status as a household name, but proclaiming its national brand status also brings censure.
“Oregon is a national brand already just based on the popularity out there, and when we use the hashtag #NationalBrand we get a bit of criticism from people saying, ‘You are a national brand, why are you purporting to say it’s a national brand?’” he says. “Well, we want to be THE national brand, and that’s the distinguishing factor.”
He points to Michigan’s Fab Five and Florida State’s Deion Sanders era as examples of schools that had the chance to become THE national brand in college athletics but were unable to rise to the level of prominence he hopes to bring Oregon to.
“They had an opportunity to capitalize on their success just like we do now,” he says. “We live in a different time than they [Florida State and Michigan] did with social media and video games to become even more popular with the youth.”
A year ago, ESPN correspondent Colin Cowherd reported that of college sports fans 17 years old and younger, Oregon was the nation’s second most popular school next to the Florida Gators. A different poll conducted by EA Sports on Facebook shows that Oregon is the nation’s favorite team to use on NCAA Football 13, with Michigan a not-so-close second by just under 19,000 votes.@@links checked@@
Pintens says that a large part of Oregon’s exposure as a national brand stems from the UO’s fruitful relationship with Nike chairman Phil Knight. For over 15 years, the UO and athletic department have benefited from the generous donations made by the school’s wealthiest alumnus.
“The attention that the football uniforms get on a weekly basis is really unparalleled  in college athletics,” Pintens says. “The engagement with fans when there is an announcement on uniforms, the spike (in social media) is unbelievable.“@@checked@@
Director of Intercollegiate Athletics Rob Mullens agrees that Nike provides the framework for Oregon becoming a national brand, but he and Pintens both see the opportunity to continue to grow the brand into not only a brand you wear, but one that you make memories with, one that you become a part of.
According to the athletic department’s overview on brand visibility, the term “Oregon helmet” was the No. 1 trending topic worldwide on Twitter on Jan. 2, 2012, the day Oregon beat the Wisconsin Badgers 45-38 in the Ducks’ first Rose Bowl victory in 95 years.
Pintens also points to celebrity patronage @@checked@@as another reason for Oregon attaining national brand status, with the likes of LeBron James, Dwayne Wade, Jack Black, Snoop Dogg and many others known to sport Duck gear from time to time. Recently, LeBron James @@checked@@tweeted a picture of himself sporting an Oregon helmet and gloves, claiming the Ducks’ football uniforms were the best in all of college football.
Although Oregon’s fanbase is growing nationally, some believe the national brand marketing scheme as a whole is contributing to the alienation of Oregon’s traditional supporters. A recent Register-Guard article by columnist Bob Welch @@checked@@took a look at this issue and pointed out that there was a six percent decrease in season ticket renewals from the previous season.
The column suggests a number of possible reasons for this. One is that football ticket prices are up 13 percent from last year. Another is that older generations of Duck fans, those who are accustomed to the former mediocrity of Oregon athletics, are feeling a general tone of arrogance emanating from the Casanova Center. Welch goes on to detail how some Oregon fans are feeling disregarded in favor of the national marketing campaign, especially those who were there when Oregon wasn’t a top-tier program.
“We’ve heard from a lot of fans prior to that article running, so I’m not surprised about that sentiment,” McNamara says on the issue. “It’s a balance to promote the Oregon Ducks as a national brand and still take care of the fans that come out and support us at Autzen or Matthew Knight Arena, and that remains a priority.”
He says he believes there are several factors attributing to lowered season ticket renewals, and the athletic department is working to connect with their fans and keep them engaged. Mullens says Pintens and the rest of his staff do a good job preserving Oregon’s small-school charm while promoting the idea of the national brand.
“Bob made a number of points in his column in which there has been a lot of change,” Mullens says. “There is a portion of our fanbase that says that we’ve priced them out, and that’s not our intention at all. Our intention is to generate the resources to be able to produce a top-10 football program.”
For now, the athletic department and Pintens are plugging away to remain at the top of college athletics.
With just one year under his belt, Pintens is still adjusting to life here in Oregon. Despite the friendly nature of Oregonians, especially in the Eugene community, it was difficult for his wife and four kids when they first moved here from Louisiana.
“Our 8-year-old daughter was a little upset she was going to miss her friends,” he says, “but our six year old, his first question was, ‘Who do I root for on Saturday?’ And I asked him, ‘Well, who do you think you should root for? He said, ‘Well I should probably root for Oregon, but I really wanna root for LSU.’”
With a little convincing — and a brand new LaMichael James jersey — Jack Pintens is now a officially a Duck. Welcome to the club, Jack.