Marcus Mariota's Heisman years in making, but not made up

Thirteen years ago, a group of boosters got together and pooled $250,000 to place a giant image of an Oregon quarterback on a billboard at the intersection of 33rd Street and Seventh Avenue, just across from Madison Square Garden.

Saturday night, "Joey Heisman" gave way to Marcus' Heisman.

In college football's annual intersection of hype and performance, Marcus Mariota won the Heisman Trophy in a runaway. And what was most remarkable was how the Duck did it. No $250,000 billboard. No campaign at all — this is probably overestimating, but the Ducks might have spent a total of $2.50 promoting Mariota — just winning performances stacked atop each other en route to the College Football Playoff.

It's the new way for Oregon football, which rose with flash but has endured with — and this is sometimes still hard to see through the sizzle — substance. It's not hard to see the trait in Mariota, a three-star recruit from Hawaii who has become a transcendent college player yet remains, to all appearances, a humble kid who is grateful for just about everything — see his heartfelt, emotional acceptance speech.

The junior is likely on his way next to the NFL Draft, where he might be the top pick. No, that's not quite right. Next is the Rose Bowl, a College Football Playoff semifinal matchup with defending national champion Florida State and Jameis Winston, last year's Heisman winner.

Not many would bet against Oregon. Not with Mariota. He's special.

But his Heisman can be traced back to "Joey Heisman."

Back in the summer of 2001, far off the radar in the Pacific Northwest, an audacious big idea hatched. Joey Harrington had played well the season before. The Ducks figured to be better that fall. How could they get people to pay attention?

And that's how Harrington came to hang high over the busy intersection — 80 feet high and with the right angle, large enough to assault the Empire State Building a few blocks away.

Then-Oregon president Dave Frohnmayer, who signed off on the billboard, recalls: "We decided … that lower/middle of the Pac-10 got us nowhere as an athletic (program) or as aspiration for UO much more generally."

Their solution was to go big, and to become emphatically unconventional. And to go big. The program had just emerged as a winner. The Ducks had only recently undergone a uniform makeover; they were just about to begin changing uniforms on a regular basis. And back then, no one else was ready to even consider the concept, except to snicker.

They snickered about the billboard, too.

"People thought we were crazy for doing it," says Jim Bartko, Oregon's former senior associate athletic director, who recently accepted the Fresno State athletic director's job.

In retrospect, it was brilliant.

What were they up against? Consider that even 13 years later, when Mariota won the Heisman, he became the first Pac-12 player not from USC to win the Heisman since 1970. But the goal back then with Harrington was more than a Heisman. It was about building the Oregon brand.

"We were still in a battle to let people know what Oregon was, where Eugene was," Bartko says.

The billboard, which wrapped around two sides of a building on the northeast corner of the intersection, went up July 1, 2001, about the same time that a group from Oregon including Harrington headed to New York for a media blitz. As part of the tour, Oregon shot video asking people on the streets of New York if they knew who the guy on the billboard was. One answer summed up their challenge: "What's an Oregon?"

"But you add up the times we were mentioned in USA TODAY or Sports Illustrated or the Wall Street Journal," Bartko says. "Everybody wrote about it: 'What's this 80-foot billboard in New York City?' "

They got a little lucky, too. Or they were prescient. Whatever. But that season Oregon went 11-1, won the Fiesta Bowl, finished No. 2 nationally. Harrington played well enough to make it to New York as a finalist. He finished fourth (Nebraska's Eric Crouch won), and told The Oregonian this week that he was announced at a Heisman dinner as Joey Harrington from "Oregon State University."

"We've had great talent and great coaching," Bartko says. "But back then, we needed a little nudge to see where Oregon could be. It all kind of worked."

You thought a billboard on a building was excess? Oregon saw it as building a brand. Like the wacky uniforms. Like all of it. And it all kind of worked.

All these years later, the Ducks are an accepted fixture on college football's upper tier, one of the sport's most recognizable brands. They no longer need to buy billboards, or to pay to put replays of their games on the YES Network in New York — yeah, they did that, too, back in the early years. But let's not kid ourselves. It was flash, and there was a huge infusion of cash — when Mariota thanked Nike founder Phil Knight and his wife Penny on Saturday night, it was genuine, but it was also an indication of just how important the super-booster has been to the Ducks' ascent.

But it was also hard work and winning. Rich Brooks built and eventually won, then gave way to Mike Bellotti, who built and won big, then gave way to Chip Kelly, who built and won bigger, then gave way to Mark Helfrich, who has continued building and is poised to win even bigger.

Oregon is in the inaugural College Football Playoff, with a great shot to win the national championship. And it was Helfrich, then the offensive coordinator, who discovered Mariota in Hawaii, a high-school quarterback who wasn't yet a starter but was throwing perfect spirals against the beautiful backdrop of Diamondhead.

As he surged this season toward the Heisman, the school did almost nothing to help push him there. It's similar to the Ducks' non-campaign in 2010, when LaMichael James was a Heisman finalist, and it's in keeping with Mariota's desire not to draw attention to himself.

"I wouldn't enjoy that," Mariota said Saturday night.

This week, above the intersection of 33rd and Seventh, the now-digital billboard featured pitches for a popular smartphone game app and the upcoming movie "Unbroken." It has been a long time since an Oregon quarterback dominated the ad space.

But if promotion is unnecessary — these days, the Oregon product sells itself — it's in part because those earlier campaigns were effective.

There's no direct line from that billboard, Joey Heisman taking Manhattan. But Mariota's Heisman is the result.