Knight has poured tens of millions of dollars into what amounts to makeup and jewelry for the athletic department. Consider the size and cost of new academic-support buildings at three big-time schools:
Miami, under construction now: 30,000 square feet, $13.6 million.
Michigan, completed in the winter of 2006: 38,000 square feet, $12 million.
Oregon: 37,000 square feet, $41.7 million.
Actually, that $41.7 million is a university estimate of how much the building cost. Knight paid for it himself and wouldn't say. The school may not even know.
What do you get for your extra $28 million? According to The Oregonian, the center features a three-story atrium, a 113-seat auditorium, "a room of bronze athlete-award statues commissioned by a Spanish artist whose sculptures are featured at the Olympic Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland" and a three-story-high etched steel mosaic of Albert Einstein. Naturally, it's not just any three-story-high etched steel mosaic of Albert Einstein. It is made out of thousands of photos of Oregon athletes taken by a photographer who followed them for a year.