Yet Ducks fans, the University of Oregon, and all of college football have paid a steep price for this rocket ship to glory.

In Oregon, where there’s no professional football franchise, Ducks pride runs as deep as Crater Lake. Up and down the west coast, and anywhere Oregonians go to escape the rain and snow, you’ll see Ducks gear proudly worn by fans from all walks of life. Count me among those rabid fans, but also count me among those who are increasingly queasy about the shame of college sports.

In part, that’s because I’ve seen firsthand how the sausage is made. As an undergrad, I worked for three years as a tutor in the university's services for student-athletes program, where I watched high school recruits rise up through the system, ending up with NFL contracts or career-ending injuries and everywhere in between. Over the years, my feelings toward the Ducks have oscillated between pride and shame. From their hurry-up offense and Nike uniforms to their recruiting violations and player conduct disasters, the Ducks have come to represent everything that's awesome, and awful, about college football, emblematic of an electrifying evolution where the style-of-play, production value, and player personalities have become larger than life.

At Oregon, the transformation of the football program has, for better or worse, coincided with a physical transformation of the university. Nike founder and former Duck Phil Knight has generously bankrolled state-of-the-art facilities across campus, turning a sleepy college town into a center of gravity in college sports. The Oregon brand is practically a master class in viral marketing, led by Puddles, the zany, Disney-inspired mascot that’s a mainstay on ESPN.

Unsurprisingly, there have been growing pains as the program becomes The Program. There was a whiff of recruiting violations at the tail end of Mike Bellotti’s tenure. Player conduct issues since then have ranged from the obnoxious (players whining about the Rose Bowl) to the outrageous (a star running back punching an opponent after a season-opening loss), besmirching the university’s reputation. (Over the weekend, two Oregon starters were benched for smoking weed.) For years, the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on state-of-the-art athletic facilities have turned faculty members and alumni into fierce opponents of Oregon athletics.

Yet Monday night, I’ll be watching the game in a bar full of likeminded hypocrites, decked out in green and gold. As Derek Thompson recently wrote, there are many ways fans can justify rooting for the big game while cringing at the consequences. In my case, it’s a combination of simple escapism, nostalgia for those bygone college years, and pure denial that my team is part of the problem.

But the Ducks are a big, flashy, talented, media-savvy part of the problem. They're Exhibit A in the case against the super conference era, when big programs generate billions of dollars of revenue at the expense of athletes’ health and education. The Ducks may not be the worst offenders, but if they fulfill their promise and become a truly elite program, they will bear a huge responsibility: Where champions lead, others will follow.