2025's 4th Q&A

From UO's new practice facility to the recent 76 I shot to much more

Artist’s conception of the new addition. (UO Athletic Department.)

Note: This is the fourth and final Q&A of 2025.

Q. Can you tell me a little about this new indoor football training facility that the University of Oregon is building?

A. Called “2. Mo,” as in the second Moshofsky Center, it is, as you’d expect a Phil Knight-funded facility to be, a state-of-the-art facility expected to be done in 2027. It will give the UO a larger, more eye-popping place to practice: 170,000 square feet, 130,000 feet of which is field space and 40,000-foot that connects to the Hatfield-Downlin Complex. The connector will include a weight room, classrooms and two players’ lounges. It will stand about 100 feet high. Two outdoor practice fields will be included. The Moshofsky facility where the Ducks currently practice indoors will be used by other UO sports teams. This according to the UO Athletic Department.

The facility will include indoor and outdoor fields. (UO Athletic Department.)

Q. Between the McKenzie River and Coburg, a giant unfinished house sits on the east side of I-5. What’s the story? Why has no progress been made for a few years?
A. The owners defaulted on a payment to their Utah-based mortgage company, according to Christian Wihtol of Eugene Weekly. A large payment: $76,000. The mortgage company won a lawsuit for $2.4 million, plus nearly $400,000 in unpaid interest and attorney’s fees. But in a surprise move, the mortgage company canceled a scheduled “sheriff’s sale” last summer, allowing the owner to keep the house. That usually happens when an owner brings payments up to date.

Q. How much has Bend’s population increased since 2000?
A. It has roughly doubled in those 25 years, going from 52,610 to 107,812.

Q. How many Nobel Prize winners have been from Oregon?
A. At least four: Linus Pauling (chemistry and peace, 1954); Carl Wieman (physics, 2001); Dale Mortensen (economics, 2010); and William Murphy (psychology of medicine, 1934). Bonus trivia: Pauling, who graduated from Oregon Agricultural College in 1922, was a classmate of my grandfather, Ben Schumacher (“Schu of ’22.”) Wieman was in my sister’s 1969 class at Corvallis High. And you gotta love this: Wieman’s mother once had a bumper sticker on the back of her car that said: “My son won the Nobel Prize.”