Ernie Kent could hardly call this a season on the brink.
Unless that’s the brink of greatness.
“It may take me to get through the season before I look back and realize just how great this team was and how good of a season it was,” Kent said. “It is incredible what these guys have accomplished.”
Whether it started with last season’s debacle or with the players’ late-night workouts last summer, whether it’s because they played as a team or simply utilized their talent, these Ducks have accomplished more than any other team in Oregon history — barring the national-champion “Tall Firs” of 1939.
How they got to this point was eight nonconference wins, a school-record 14 Pacific-10 Conference wins and one postseason win that all ended in a No. 2 seed in the NCAA Tournament, starting today.
“All they’ve been focused on is winning, and they’ve been rewarded with a No. 2 seed in the NCAA Tournament,” Kent said.
Win, win, win. That’s what a dream season looks like. And that’s what happened in the first three games, as the Ducks slammed, jammed, thank-you-ma’amed on their way to winning their own America’s Youth Classic tournament. Then came a slightly more impressive win over Louisville in Portland.
But then came the road losses — three straight, at Massachusetts, Portland and Minnesota, all in the last minute — and the naysayers came out.
“That was the media’s perception,” Kent said of the people who doubted his Ducks. “This team was a team that just needed to grow.”
Then came the two wins that would serve to define Oregon’s season from that point. Back-to-back 100-point performances in the Ducks’ first two Pac-10 games. Oregon beat Arizona State 103-90, then turned around and clobbered Arizona 105-75. Two weeks later, the Ducks would do the same damage to the Wildcats in the desert but then lose at Arizona State.
Two home wins against the Bay Area schools, especially an 87-79 win over Stanford that shook some of Kent’s personal demons, solidified Oregon as a Pac-10 contender. The rest of the conference season played out like a dream, with minor nightmares at Washington and in the Bay Area, where the Ducks lost two games in three overtimes.
Then Oregon traveled to Southern California, to the basketball fortresses at USC and UCLA, and nobody expected them to come home with an outright Pac-10 title, which essentially required two wins. But the Ducks once again proved wrong their doubters with a 67-65 win at USC and a 65-62 win at UCLA to take the Pac-10 title by a full two games.
“I got a Pac-10 championship this year, and that’s what this team has worked for,” guard Freddie Jones said.
Oregon failed to win the second Pac-10 championship, the Pac-10 Tournament in Los Angeles. That honor went to Arizona instead.
But the Ducks returned home as champions and cut down the McArthur Court nets as Pac-10 champs on selection Sunday.
The numbers from the season are amazing. The list of “firsts” is long, like first time ever that Oregon had Pac-10 champion football and basketball teams. But the numbers can’t quantify a team that truly played like one.
“They’ve bought into the team,” Kent said. “They’ve sacrificed the ‘I’ and the individuality.”
And that team mentality has led the Ducks to the brink…
Of greatness.