Four years ago, the Ducks were on top of the basketball world. Oregon women’s basketball was projected to be placed into the Portland Regional as a No. 1 seed after coming off a conference-best 31-2 record.
That changed with the cancellation of the NCAA Tournament due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Flash forward to 2024, and Portland is once again hosting a regional in the tournament. This time, the Ducks will be sitting at home.
The return of college basketball’s biggest tournament in the state of Oregon is a stark reminder of how far the team has fallen in a matter of a few years.
This season — just like in 2020 — has been a historic one for Oregon women’s basketball. This time around, it’s not the good kind of historic. The Ducks rounded out the season with 14 straight losses, the worst streak in program history. They only recorded two wins in the entirety of Pac-12 play and had an overall record of 11-21.
“We’re struggling this year. Everybody knows it,” Oregon head coach Kelly Graves said after a February loss to UCLA. “We’re the ones that have set the bar and we haven’t reached our own. The bar was set in the last 10 years.”
Prior to the start of Graves’ tenure, an 11-21 record would’ve been pretty typical for this program. As Graves pointed out after the regular season, the Ducks only won five NCAA Tournament games in their history before he took over in 2014. They’ve won 12 since.
Graves and his Oregon squad seemed bound to take it a step further in the 2020 season. The Ducks had already cut a couple of nets from winning the Pac-12 regular season and Pac-12 Tournament and they had their eyes set on cutting down a couple more.
Everything appeared to line up perfectly for Oregon that year. It proved itself by making its first Final Four the previous season. It had both the future No. 1 and No. 2 picks in the WNBA Draft, Sabrina Ionescu and Satou Sabally, as well as the dominant power forward Ruthy Hebard. With a regional being hosted just a couple hours north in Portland, the Ducks had a good shot at making its second straight Final Four.
But things didn’t end up working out as neatly as anticipated. Oregon’s season — and the illustrious careers of several of its greatest players — ended following the Pac-12 Tournament.
“It appears our ‘unfinished business’ will remain just that,” Graves said on X, formerly known as Twitter, in March 2020. “Disappointed but I completely understand.”
The cancellation of the 2020 NCAA Tournament didn’t just crush the dreams of Oregon fans. It signified a crashing halt in the Ducks’ Pac-12 reign.
Oregon made the NCAA Tournament in the next two seasons after 2020. Its exits came sooner and sooner before finally missing out on the tournament completely in 2023.
The Ducks’ 2024 season will once again be done following their appearance in the Pac-12 Tournament, preventing them from making the trip to Portland. This season, it won’t be a global pandemic stopping them. Instead, it’s their shortcomings.
“We’ve had a pretty good run here,” Graves said after the team’s last regular season loss against Stanford. “I don’t think that run’s over, but it’s been a difficult season.”
Between blowout losses and only two conference wins, this program has plummeted from the top of the Pac-12 to the bottom. Graves is still adamant that Oregon can return to the powerhouse it once was. To do that, he says it will require recruiting and retaining its best players — something it has struggled to do in recent years.
While the Ducks tumbled from their peak quickly, some programs have also returned to their peak just as fast. Take Oregon State, for example, which went from 11th in the Pac-12 last season to now No. 13 nationally. Graves seems to believe his team can do the same thing.
In 2030, it will mark 10 years since the season that left a hole in the hearts of Oregon fans. It will also indicate the first time that Portland will host the Women’s Final Four. The last four years proved to the Ducks how hard it is to stay at the top. The next six will determine whether or not their time there was a fluke.
