Editor’s Note:Oregon men’s basketball enters the Pac-12 tournament as the conference regular season champion and No. 1 seed. Ezra Amacher, a sports editor at The Daily Wildcat, writes why Arizona’s reign is certainly not over.
After Oregon defeated Arizona in McKale Center in late January, Ducks head coach Dana Altman needed a moment to reflect on the significance of the win.
His team had just walked into McKale and done what no other program could do over the past two years – knock off the Wildcats on their home court.
Not only that, Oregon won the game in convincing fashion, sending the Arizona faithful to the exits well before the final buzzer rang.
For Altman, the victory was one he had been pursuing for years.
“Our program, we’ve been chasing Arizona,” Altman told reporters postgame.
Then he added, “And we still are.”
In the weeks since that win, Oregon held control of the Pac-12 standings and clinched the regular season title this past weekend. Altman was named the Pac-12 Coach of the Year for the second straight season.
The Ducks enter Las Vegas as the Pac-12’s best hope at a top seed. National pundits label Oregon a potential Final Four team.
Arizona, meanwhile, lumbered to a 12-6 league record. Most bracketologists put Arizona in the five or six range heading into the conference tournament.
That’s not a bad position, but it certainly doesn’t meet the expectations of head coach Sean Miller, who has led Arizona to back-to-back Elite Eight appearances.
With Oregon coming off a strong regular season in a year that featured a less-than-stellar Arizona team, it may be easy for some to argue that the Ducks have caught up to the Wildcats or are at least right on their tail.
This, however, would ignore the established culture Miller has in place at Arizona, a type of culture that Oregon still lacks.
Let’s take each program’s 2015-16 attendance numbers as an example.
In a year that featured the Ducks’ highest regular-season win total in modern Oregon basketball, the program managed to fill just 60 percent of Matthew Knight Arena’s seating across the course of the season.
The gym, which rivals Arizona’s McKale Center with its state-of-the-art facilities, rarely puts opponents on edge.
McKale, on the other hand, was filled to or near capacity all season long, even the Saturday after Arizona fell to the Ducks.
By the time Oregon State arrived to close out the home stand, Wildcats fans were ready to bear witness to another record-breaking home winning streak.
Attendance and fan support don’t necessarily correlate directly with on-court success, but they do reflect the attitude of the current and future state of a program.
At Arizona, 30-win seasons have become the norm. Oregon has not won 30 games in a season in 71 years.
And what’s the best way to ensure future success? Recruiting, of course.
On Monday night, Arizona guaranteed itself another top-10 recruiting class when five-star shooting guard Rawle Alkins committed to the Wildcats on ESPNU.
Alkins, ironically, took his first unofficial visit to Arizona on the night of the loss to Oregon.
As the Ducks celebrated the win in the opposing locker room as if they’d just won a championship, Alkins witnessed the hardship one single loss places on the Arizona program.
“One thing when I took that visit that really stuck with me is that winning is the only option to them,” Alkins said.
Only at Arizona is winning everything.