Sooners' date at Autzen is more evidence Ducks have arrived.

Byline: Ron Bellamy / The Register-Guard

It's more than a football game, Oklahoma at Oregon, Saturday afternoon at Autzen Stadium. It's an event that will fill up every hotel room in the Eugene-Springfield area, and points north and south. It's a celebration that has inspired downtown Eugene businesses to open their doors and their cash registers to visitors from Oklahoma.

And it is a living symbol of where Oregon has been as a football program, and what it has become.

The nation, those watching through the lenses of the ABC cameras, might view this as simply No. 15 Oklahoma - underdogs by 4 1/2 points - against the No. 18 Ducks. A fairly attractive early season matchup of moderately ranked teams with higher expectations, and a rematch of last year's Holiday Bowl.

If you're from Oklahoma - the Sooners purchased their entire allotment of 4,000 tickets, and there's a charter plane to bring an OU alumni group - it's a trip that offers a chance to see the Pacific Ocean, or to visit the Cascades or the Oregon wine country.

But here, at Oregon, this game is more than a game.

Because Oklahoma represents the kind of program that Oregon still strives to be - a program that wins national championships, that is at least part of that discussion every year, that is synonymous with winning football - and Oklahoma reminds us, in a twisted and somewhat painful way, of the program that Oregon used to be.

A program that, once upon a time, couldn't even dream of hosting a school of Oklahoma's stature, a program that instead went to places like Oklahoma to play football games simply to get a paycheck to defray a budget deficit, and to get thrashed in the process.

Including last year's Holiday Bowl loss, Oregon is 0-6 all-time against Oklahoma and scored a total of 31 points in those losses.

But then consider Oklahoma's credentials: Seven national titles, four Heisman Trophy winners, five Outland Trophy winners.

In the 110 years of Oregon football, the Ducks have hosted the No. 1 team in the nation at Autzen Stadium four times - Southern California in 1968, 1972 and last year, drawing a state-record crowd of 59,129, and Washington in 1992.

They hosted, and defeated, Brigham Young the year its quarterback, Ty Detmer, won the Heisman Trophy. They've hosted respected programs such as Colorado, Michigan State and Iowa.

But in all those years, only three previous nonconference visitors to Eugene have been among the most elite programs in the nation, programs arguably in anybody's all-time top five in the land, the programs that win national championships and produce Heisman Trophy winners and Outland Trophy winners, the programs that are icons in college football:

Ohio State, in 1967. Notre Dame, in 1982. Michigan, in 2003, when the then-largest crowd in state history, 59,023, the loudest crowd Michigan coach Lloyd Carr said he ever heard, watched the Ducks outplay the Wolverines and play themselves onto the cover of Sports Illustrated - the same magazine that, 31 years earlier, had put the Sooners on the cover, Greg Pruitt running past Ducks, after a 68-3 destruction of Oregon in Norman.

And now comes Oklahoma, in 2006.

"I feel like everybody in town is excited and they've been looking at this day for a long time and now we can talk about it and go ahead and get excited," Oregon coach Mike Bellotti said this week. "I think everybody has a right to. It'll be a big game. It should be a fun game. It's a great challenge and opportunity for both programs."

When the Gipper squirmed

Until Autzen Stadium opened in 1967, the Ducks played home games at their track facility, Hayward Field (football capacity, 23,500), but also played home games at Multnomah Stadium in Portland (37,500), which offered a larger capacity and was favored by the Portland donors.

Not only did the Ducks play top league foes in Portland, such as Washington, UCLA and Southern California, but virtually any nonconference opponent of stature, such as Texas in 1947, Nebraska in 1952, Penn State and Indiana in 1963, and Pittsburgh in 1964.

Autzen, with its capacity of over 40,000 almost doubling the size of Hayward Field, allowed the Ducks to stay in Eugene for all home games, and in 1967 Oregon opened the new stadium with Colorado and then, in a coup, formally dedicated the stadium in an Oct. 7 game against Ohio State, then coached by Woody Hayes, with four national championships already, and another to be won in 1968.

The seeds for that game had been sown when the Ducks played Ohio State in the Rose Bowl after the 1957 season, losing valiantly to the eventual national champs, 10-7. "We developed a close friendship" with Ohio State personnel, former Oregon athletic director Norv Ritchey said. "I always kept reminding them, `If we ever get the stadium built, we want you as the dedication game.'

"It was a great deal to have them here."

However, the game, won by the Buckeyes 30-0 - the Ducks were in the middle of what would be three straight scoreless games in coach Jerry Frei's first year - drew only 25,000.

The Notre Dame visit, 15 years later, was also the result of personal contacts. In 1968, Notre Dame's athletic director, Moose Krause, came to Oregon for the funeral of an Irish football player in Grants Pass, and then came to Eugene, where AD Len Casanova and lumberman Peter Murphy, an Irish grad, showed him Autzen Stadium.

They began negotiating toward a game, which finally materialized Oct. 23, 1982, Notre Dame's first visit to the Northwest since 1949.

The game drew 40,381, then the ninth-largest crowd in Autzen history, many of them Notre Dame fans. Eugene hotels were sold out. The Valley River Inn set a record for room revenue. Patrons waited 90 minutes for tables in restaurants. An Irish pep rally was held the night before the game, and Oregon's governor, Vic Atiyeh, spoke there, as did Eugene mayor Gus Keller.

"If you think you have an easy test tomorrow, God help you," Keller warned Irish fans.

"He will," responded the fans of the Catholic university.

Not enough. The game ended in a 13-13 tie, when Irish coach Gerry Faust elected to kick a field goal against a winless Oregon team on fourth-and-10 from the UO 18 with 11 seconds left. Wrote The Register-Guard's Bud Withers: "Perhaps the Gipper didn't turn over in his grave, but for a minute there, you could almost see him squirm."

The road to respectability

Tough times in the 1970s and early 1980s forced Oregon to send its football team on the road for paydays, with no hope of a return game. And so the Ducks lost 68-3 at Oklahoma in 1972, 61-7 at Nebraska in 1974, 62-7 at Oklahoma in 1975 and 63-0 at Nebraska in 1985.

It was that loss that convinced then-AD Bill Byrne that the Ducks couldn't save their program by getting it killed, and Oregon's nonconference schedule began trending toward home-and-home arrangements and more winnable games.

Byrne also restored Big Ten programs, sometimes with reputations more marketable than the current talent, to the UO schedule. Oregon's Rose Bowl and Cotton Bowl appearances after the 1994 and '95 seasons further enabled the Ducks to schedule the likes of Michigan State, Wisconsin and Indiana, (though Oregon's nonconference slates were also geared toward ensuring bowl eligibility).

All that, however, paled in comparison to athletic director Bill Moos landing a home-and-home with Michigan, though Moos had to agree to delay Oregon's trip there, originally slated for 2002, until 2007 to ensure that the Wolverines would come to Autzen Stadium for a $350,000 guarantee in 2003, in the year that Autzen's seating capacity expanded to more than 54,000 seats.

To Oregon, viewed as nouveau riche, with Nike money and glitzy uniforms, Michigan represented Old School tradition, a program whose uniforms never changed, a program that boasted 11 national championships and three Heisman Trophy winners.

The Sports Illustrated cover played off that sense of colliding cultures after Oregon's 31-27 win (`Dazzling Ducks: Rich, Cool and 4-0'), though Oregon then lost three of four.

The Oklahoma home-and-home series, with each program receiving a guarantee of $300,000, stemmed from discussions between Moos and Oklahoma AD Joe Castiglione in 2004, when the Sooners found themselves with an open date for that upcoming season. The Ducks had to extract themselves from a commitment to play at Nevada - Moos said Tuesday that Oregon will fulfill that commitment in 2013, if not earlier - and lost the game in Norman, 31-7.

Now, the Sooners are paying the return visit.

"It's an opportunity to showcase Oregon football across the country, and to provide for our fans the kind of quality opponent they deserve to see in their home stadium," Moos said.

Future Oregon schedules include home-and-home games with Purdue (there in 2008, home in 2009), with Tennessee (there in 2010, home in 2013), and with Georgia (home in 2015, there in 2016), with tentative agreements for home-and-homes with Kansas State and Colorado, with guarantees of as much as $550,000.

The list of other schools that Oregon has at least contacted about possible dates starts with Nebraska, Alabama, Penn State, Ohio State and Notre Dame.

"It's another illustration of how we've evolved and how the program has moved forward," Moos said.

Then and now

When Notre Dame played here in 1982, pregame coverage in this newspaper mentioned special shuttle buses that would take fans to the game, to alleviate traffic problems; now, shuttles are used for every home game, as Oregon has a string of 43 straight home sellouts.

And now every home weekend puts a premium on hotel rooms in the Eugene-Springfield area, though this weekend will be more crowded than most.

"Typically on a home weekend it's pretty full, but I would say this is going to be among the largest in terms of outside visitation," said Lisa Lawton, director of community relations for the Convention and Visitors Association of Lane County Oregon.

Of 55 hotels, motels and bed-and-breakfasts - representing 3,179 rooms - tracked by CVALCO, only four properties showed a few rooms Tuesday, perhaps a dozen total, available for Friday and Saturday night, Lawton said, including properties in Cottage Grove, Creswell and Junction City.

"I know we're really full," she said, noting that many Oklahoma fans have talked about staying for an extended vacation in the Willamette Valley.

To welcome Oklahoma fans, the visitors association will have staff members at the Eugene Airport on Friday. Along with Downtown Eugene Inc., the association is also planning a "Sooner Stroll" through downtown Eugene on Friday night, starting at 7 p.m. at the Ax Billy Grill & Sports Bar at the Downtown Athletic Club, and offering specials on food and drinks, as well as live music in some places, for OU and UO fans at Ambrosia restaurant, the Eugene Hilton, Rock N Rodeo and Jogger's Bar and Grill.

"It's a new thing," said Russ Brink, executive director of the downtown association. "Hopefully, it's something we can make a tradition, at least for the major games when you know there are going to be a lot of the opponent's fans in town."

And a "major" game this is for Oregon, not so much in the significance of the outcome itself - league titles, bowl wins, those things are more important, and Oregon's played for them and won them - but in the simple fact that the game is here, and all that that means.