The flip side of being the beneficiary of Phil Knight's millions is, you can look pretty foolish losing with all that largess.

Just about everybody else has an excuse. What was Oregon's, after a generally tepid five-year run from 2002 to 2006 upon Joey Harrington's departure?

Today, the Ducks host Arizona State in the country's headline game, matching the Nos. 4-5 teams in the BCS standings. It's easy to see that the maturity of players like Dennis Dixon and Jonathan Stewart have Oregon in position to challenge for a national championship.

What isn't so obvious is that Bellotti had to work in the offseason to repair fissures in a program that slipped to a modest 23-18 Pac-10 record the past five years.

Let Robin Pflugrad, the former Washington State assistant in his second season as an aide to Bellotti, describe what happened on a late-winter evening in Eugene.

The talk of the town was the Oregon men's basketball team, headed toward an Elite Eight appearance in the NCAA tournament. Football had been just 7-6, with four finishing losses.

They had pizza at the Casanova Center, and then everybody boarded buses for Camp Harlow, a retreat facility just north of Eugene. Everybody meant everybody — players, coaches, trainers, student-service personnel, academic-support specialists.

"It wasn't, 'His coach takes his nice car, and this (player) has to take his bike because he doesn't have money,' " Pflugrad said. "We were all the same — race, creed, color. That was really neat."

Anybody could air discontent, and they did.

"Some things were brutally honest," Pflugrad says. "I mean brutally honest."

One player complained that when he needed to find his position coach, he was always out recruiting. When some players seemed to go over the top with their gripes, one coach referred to "steak and lobster" in what has become one of the nation's glitziest programs and asked rhetorically, "Don't you have it pretty good?"

The group soul-search lasted about five hours, to midnight. There was a 6 a.m. workout the next day.

Of course, such sessions always look better in the glow of a turnaround. This one worked because representatives on a player-coach committee felt more empowered and because Oregon changed its practice routine, often going shorter but more intensely.

"We wanted to practice less but compete more," Bellotti says. "Practice wasn't something to be gotten out of, but to be able to take part in."

So the Ducks competed. Every day, Pflugrad says, there's some sort of offense-defense competition, or one involving special teams.

"You might make the loser of that game do push-ups," says Pflugrad. "I think the players really wanted that. Sometimes when you have the service team giving you looks all the time, that can get pretty boring."

In an unprecedented season of home games with big implications — California, USC, Arizona State — Oregon (7-1) now meets a plucky, undefeated Sun Devils team that expects quarterback Rudy Carpenter to be available after last week's thumb injury.

No wonder Dennis Erickson, the coach, is enjoying himself. The Arizona Republic reported this week that with incentive clauses in his contract, he picked up an extra $50,000 for his eighth win, "with another million still on the table" for each remaining victory, incrementally, up to 12.

Oregon's Dixon, meanwhile, has wedged his way into the Heisman Trophy discussion, a debate that shouldn't exclude Stewart, the graduate of Timberline High in Lacey whose 1,043 yards rushing is built on a hefty 6.7-yard average.