A 10-1 start turned into a disastrous 4-13 finish.
Oregon did end its 2001 season with a win at Oregon State to give the Ducks a 14-14 final record and hope for a postseason invitation.
No, not to the NCAA Tournament. Those dreams had been dashed weeks prior. Oregon felt it deserved a shot at the NIT.
It didn’t happen. And after you’ve been rejected by the NIT, the wheels start turning.
Are we that bad? Didn’t we win 10 of the first 11 games of the season? What happened, and where did it all go wrong?
The answers were hard for the Ducks to come up with at the time.
There were reports that Luke Ridnour had considered transferring — rumors that Ridnour denies.
What Ridnour doesn’t deny is the extreme pain he felt after his freshman season ended. This was a McDonald’s All-American point guard who led his Blaine High Borderites to consecutive AA state titles while residing in the tiny town of Blaine, Wash., which is located on the border of Canada.
Ridnour wasn’t used to losing, and he surely didn’t turn down the likes of Kentucky, Gonzaga and UCLA to become a part of a losing program at Oregon.
So the soon-to-be sophomore only knew of one way to turn things around, and his philosophy was soon shared by the entire team.
“Everybody was pretty bummed about the season and wanted to change things,” Ridnour said. “So everyone just worked out really hard.”
It was as simple as that, yet it involved so much more than simply “working out.”
It involved an entire team coming together, making a commitment to stay in Eugene over the summer and basically starting things anew.
It became a fresh start that refreshed the players.
“As a whole team, it was just the summer where we all worked together and began seeing it all pay off,” senior center Chris Christoffersen said. “It gave us the confidence in each other and ourselves. ‘Hey, we can do this.’ That flipped the switch for us.”

Like stumbling through a dark room and not knowing where to go, the Ducks found the switch, saw the light and finally knew the path they should take together.
There was the sophomore quartet of Ridnour, Luke Jackson, Jay Anderson and James Davis, who would all leave the house they share together and spend the mornings in the weight room and the afternoons and evenings in McArthur Court.
“We all committed our time to going to summer school and working out in the weight room all morning and playing all day,” Jackson said. “It’s just real addicting. Once everyone started going, everyone wanted to be in there more.”
That included the junior college transfers, Brian Helquist and Robert Johnson, who moved in together at the University Commons and immediately joined the team’s summer of redemption.
“Spending the summer with us really helped them in their transformation into becoming a Duck,” Christoffersen said.
Together, the Ducks transformed themselves from an inconsistent, frustrated team to a driven, confident bunch.
“We knew that as soon as everyone got here that summer that this season was going to be completely different,” Ridnour said. “Everyone got along a lot better.”
Added senior Freddie Jones: “We’re not the same team.”
By the time October rolled around, head coach Ernie Kent saw something in his players’ eyes that was missing the year before: “An ‘eye of the tiger’ look,” as he described it.
So when it came time for the media’s preseason Pac-10 predictions to come out, Kent wasn’t at all surprised to see Oregon picked sixth. He was confident that his team would prove people wrong.
“If I were the media, I would have done the same thing,” Kent said. “Because on paper, we looked like the sixth-place team. But the media was not in the weight room in the spring when the two Lukes went to work. They certainly weren’t in the gymnasium in the summer time and weren’t there at 2 in the morning when half this team was still in there working out.
“All those unknown intangibles that you want your team to work on in the offseason, this team did it. They made up their mind that they were going to get this done and they did.
“So the credit goes to them.”
Now, the Ducks march into the madness of the pressure-packed Big Dance.
But given what they were faced with 365 days ago, playing amid the bright lights of the NCAA Tournament can hardly be considered hard work.
“This is all fun,” Ridnour said.