Oregon football has officially arrived

— -- LOS ANGELES -- No. 1  Alabama and No. 4 Ohio State bring to the College Football Playoff a history rich in tradition and championships. No. 3  Florida State has been a consistent power in the sport for nearly all of the past 30 years. The three programs bring to the inaugural four-team format a stamp of legitimacy.

But for No. 2  Oregon, the reverse is true. The playoff serves as proof the Ducks have signed a long-term lease in the sport's penthouse.

The power of a program transcends a coach. It transcends a player or a class of recruits. Therein lies the first illustration that Oregon football has arrived.

Over the past six seasons, with a complete roster turnover and a head-coaching change from Chip Kelly to Mark Helfrich, Oregon has won four Pac-12 Conference championships. That's as many as the Ducks won in the entire postwar era, from 1945 through 2008. Oregon's win percentage of .872 over the past four seasons is third only to Alabama's (.898) and Florida State's (.889).

Look at how quarterback Marcus Mariota won the Heisman Trophy this season. The redshirt junior put up the numbers, with six single-season school records, including 3,783 passing yards and 38 touchdowns. More to the point, he performed that well as the preseason favorite -- an indication people expect Oregon to perform at a championship level.

"It's a blessing," Oregon defensive coordinator Don Pellum said. "It's awesome that now we're expected to have great seasons. It's wonderful. But it's real interesting. A number of years ago, a winning season was six, seven, eight wins. Now, that's not really what we're trying to achieve. That's not what the expectations are."

Pellum lettered for the Ducks from 1982 to '84. In those three seasons, Oregon won 12 games, the same number they won this season. Pellum, 52, has coached the Ducks for all but four seasons of his professional life. He remembers what Oregon football used to be.

"We didn't have offices," Pellum said. "For years, we had all the coaches in one room. When you're recruiting, you're not going to bring the players in and show them your meeting room. You don't have meeting rooms."

That made recruiting visits a shell game.

"We'd give a campus tour," Pellum said. "We'd come back. The offices are next to Mac Court. We wouldn't take them into the offices. We would go sit in Mac Court."

McArthur Court was built in 1926 and became outdated long before the university built a new arena in 2011.

"Back in those years, there wasn't anything," Pellum said. "To dream of sitting there and thinking, 'We're going to have all this and be this caliber program' when you didn't have anything, that's really dreaming."

Rich Brooks, who hired Pellum, shoved, dragged and tugged the Ducks toward respectability. The only equity Oregon really had was sweat equity.

"Coach Brooks was trying to get to a Rose Bowl," Pellum said. "And we were going to do it with just coaching. Right? We were going to develop players. We were going to take the best athletes and make them players. That was the basis of this program."

Twenty years ago, Oregon won the Pac-10 for the first time since 1957. In 2000, under coach Mike Bellotti (now an ESPN analyst), Oregon reached the AP top five for the first time in school history. The Ducks won the Pac-10 again in 2001 and finished the season No. 2 in the country. But until 2009, Oregon took a backseat in the conference to the  USC dynasty. The Ducks won games -- not championships.

Five years ago, shortly after Bellotti resigned as coach, he wrote, "The program has come a ways in the last few years, but we still embrace blue-collar values."

Lunch pails are for guys who don't eat in the executive cafeteria. Bellotti's statement sounds downright cute now, what with a new football building that would make Donald Trump blush. But that $68 million monument to Phil Knight's generosity demonstrates the desire, the commitment and the infrastructure that insure Oregon will not be the next  Colorado.

In an eight-year span from 1989 to 1996, a span that involved two head coaches (Bill McCartney and Rick Neuheisel), a share of one national championship (1990) and one Heisman Trophy (Rashaan Salaam, 1994), the Buffaloes went 78-10-1 (.882). But Neuheisel slipped, and when he left, Gary Barnett's teams showed flashes of brilliance but didn't sustain the program's national stature.

Since Colorado pushed Barnett out the door in 2005, the Buffs have not had a winning season.

There are other examples:  Tennessee became a national power in the 1990s and the first half of the 2000s but hasn't won more than seven games in seven years.  Nebraska hasn't finished above No. 14 in the national rankings since it played for the BCS championship 13 years ago.

Oregon has made seamless transitions of power from Bellotti to Kelly to Helfrich. Pellum is one of five assistants with at least 10 years on the Ducks staff. The university administration and the athletic department are in lockstep. All the resources needed to win are in place.

"As the success on the field started to happen, all of a sudden, all the infrastructure and everything around us started to grow, then it became a reality," Pellum said. "Then, it's like, the expectations are high, but you know what? We have more than we've ever had. We can work with this. We have a chance."

Mariota leaves after this season, and that will be one more transition. But Oregon looks as if it isn't going anywhere anytime soon.