It only takes two to tango at the nation’s best track meet, and the Ducks found that out the hard way Saturday.
This past season, the Oregon men’s track and field team got 20 points from two athletes and finished ninth at the NCAA Championships. This season, both those athletes — decathlete Santiago Lorenzo and javelin thrower John Stiegeler — missed the meet with injuries, and the Ducks scored seven points to finish 35th.
Louisiana State won the NCAA title on its own track. The Tigers scored 64 points, edging second-place Tennessee by seven points. Southern Methodist was third with 42 points.
Only two Oregon athletes of the seven Ducks who made the trip to Baton Rouge, La., scored points at the national meet. One of those athletes was senior Micah Harris, who finished seventh in the 110 hurdles race Saturday.
“I felt relaxed coming in, and everything went pretty well technique-wise,” Harris said. “I would have loved to finish higher, but (the other hurdlers) showed how good they were.”
Harris got to the finals after two close heats on Thursday and Friday. In Thursday’s quarterfinal, Harris finished fourth in his heat but 11th overall. Friday he finished fifth in his semifinal, but his time was 0.06 seconds faster than the fifth-place finisher in the other semifinal. He was the ninth and final member of the final race.
“Making it through the finals and building toward this is a big achievement,” Harris said.
Harris earned All-American honors, a title that eluded him last year when he failed to make the finals.
“It’s great to be an All-American, and bottom line, that was what I was here for,” Harris said.
Oregon senior Billy Pappas also ran the 110 hurdles on Saturday, but it wasn’t with Harris. Pappas opened Saturday’s decathlon action with the race, then went on to compete in the discus, pole vault, javelin and 1,500.
Pappas finished second in his hurdles heat and also performed well in the pole vault, finishing second overall. He finished 11th in the competition with 7,514 points, 18 points shy of his personal best.
“I didn’t have as good a day as I would have liked, but it wasn’t from a lack of effort,” Pappas said. “The level of competition was incredible, and it wasn’t an easy day for me, and I know I gave it my all.”
On Friday, sophomore pole vaulter Trevor Woods was defeated by Xs and Os instead of athletes. He cleared 17 feet, 4 1/2 inches, the same height cleared by the fourth-place finisher, but missed twice before making it over the bar. The two misses, marked as Xs on the scoresheet, cost him a top-eight finish.

The situation was familiar to Woods, who cleared the champion’s height at the NCAA indoor championships earlier this season but dropped to third because of misses.
The Ducks, who finished second at the Pacific-10 Conference Championships, finished fourth among Pac-10 teams at the NCAA Championships. Stanford, which took the conference crown, finished eighth overall at the national meet. UCLA and Washington finished tied for 30th with eight points each.
But the NCAA Championships belonged to LSU, which became the first squad since Oregon in 1984 to win the national title on its home track. The Tigers got a win from Claston Bernard in the decathlon en route to scoring 25 points on the final day of competition, but they still needed a thrilling finish to win the crown.
Heading into the final event, the 4×400 relay, LSU needed at least a third-place finish to sew up the team title. The event was essentially a rematch of the Southeastern Conference Championships, where LSU finished second in the 4×400 but lost the team title to Tennessee. But on their home track, the Tigers needed third and got it, edging fourth-place East Carolina by 0.48 seconds.
Next year’s NCAA Championships will be held in Sacramento, Calif.