It was reported on Thursday that Oregon basketball player Josh Crittle will not return for his junior season with the Ducks, making him the third Oregon player to leave the program since long-time head coach Ernie Kent’s firing back in early March.
On Tuesday, Matthew Humphrey said he won’t be back, and fellow junior Drew Wiley also elected to take his game elsewhere; he will suit up for the Boise State Broncos next winter. Wiley’s decision to transfer was a year overdue and came as no surprise after seeing his minutes cut in half from his freshman to sophomore seasons.
But with all that’s surrounding the Oregon athletic department these days, this too has begun to scare me.
Wiley, one of four Oregonians on the Ducks roster, was considered one of the best prep players in the state as a senior for Springfield’s Thurston High School. Yet when he laced up at the Division-I level, he looked like a deer in the headlights. Greatly in part to being outmatched physically, Wiley’s two seasons for Oregon were lackluster at best.
But what Wiley — and teammates Garrett Sim and E.J. Singler — represent in the grand scheme of things may be something far more important: local talent. Oregon as a program has failed dramatically to tap into the high school talent on the West Coast, and now all but two of the team’s scholarship players are more than 1,500 miles from their hometowns. This brings me back to Humphrey.
Humphrey may not have been a star by any means, but he was nothing short of a strong contributor and at the very least a consistent three-point threat. And let’s not forget he was brought in with a pair of his buddies from Chicago — junior centers Mike Dunigan and Josh Crittle. This is where I start to get a little nervous.
You’ve got one relatively popular player on the team deciding to take his game to another program due to the huge vacancy left after Kent’s departure. My question is, how long before the rest of the team does the same?
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If Dunigan and Crittle see Humphrey go and get picked up by another program with even the slightest sense of stability, wouldn’t they be remotely interested in starting somewhere fresh? After all, the Ducks have gone 24-39 over the past two seasons.
But then, what would that lead to? Would junior Teondre Williams see more than half of his fellow recruiting class leave and jump on that bandwagon? What about sophomore Jamil Wilson, a good friend of both Williams and Humphrey, who denied rumors of also transferring but also said he plans to wait and see who they bring in as the next coach?
If you do the math, before long you’ve got walk-ons John Elorriaga and Nicholas Fearn playing respectable minutes. Speculative? Maybe. But that doesn’t mean the scenario is that far out of the realm of possibility.
With no head coach around and one assistant heading out the door next season as well, who’s to tell the entire Oregon team not to transfer? With only two seniors and one junior on last year’s squad, it’s hard to imagine the team’s best basketball had already been played. The addition of junior college transfers Malcolm Armstead and Jeremy Jacob, arguably the most consistent players on the team, definitely played a key role in Oregon’s limited success last year. But what’s keeping them from looking elsewhere, too?
Ultimately, the longer the coaching search takes, the more players are going to be tempted to leave. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Even with an unfinished Matthew Knight Arena, the promise of a new coach is something that’s 39 days overdue. Because before long Oregon will have a new coach and a new arena, but will they have a team?