Ernie Kent rehearsing his next career move?

Just hours after his team got bounced from the Pac-10 tournament (which was expected), Oregon head-coached perched himself at the Fox Sports Net booth covering the Pac-10 conference tournament, being the expert coach-analyst, alongside the annoying Donnie Mac (UCLA defense-optional scorer Don MacLane), and Michael Eaves. Thankfully we were spared of Billy Mac this time. Thank you FSN :)

Memphis destroys GoneZaga

But before we talk about the actual game, when it was the last time you heard a game really analyzed by the two basketball analysts? Bob Knight and Jay Bilas should be nominated for an ESPY for their performance as REAL college basketball analysts during the game. What a difference between listening to them versus Dookie Vitale! Holy cow. ESPN, make sure you have more Bilas/Knight duets in the future!

This game showed why GoneZaga has been having not-so-good March Madness runs. Austin Daye was playing the role of (now Laker) Ammo (but no public tears) ;-) They got punched in the mouth by Memphis and they simply couldn't wake up. Not until the backup point guard, Goodson and Ira Brown came in the game and added some "onions" to the floor. Then GoneZaga made a comeback, but despite the help from the crowd, it was too little too late.

This bodes well for Memphis as their new point-guard is Tyreke Evans 2.0, being more "point-guardy" than ever before. Maybe he had some ...Rosey tutorials?

This bodes not so well for Gonzaga. Their most likely NCAA scenario looks once again like a first or second round exit at the hands of a tough defensive team that can barely score 50 points ;-)

And it's really sad for Gonzaga, because once again, they have a boatload of talent.

And what may be the tombstone of this program as a national powerhouse (they are running on past-fumes) is that Mark Few may "return home" to Oregon next year.

Although perhaps Oregon may borrow a page from the Washington State book. If Dick Bennett who couldn't coach offense even if the opposing team had no defense was able to turn "remote" Washington State into a program, then imagine what Bob Knight could do at Oregon and with Nike's resources!

But would the socially progressive peoples of the Pacific Northwest accept an authoritarian bully with an anger-management problem and a long history of issues as their new head coach?

On the plus side, there are plenty of woods there for Bob Knight to go hunt, and who knows, he may be he is the one who shoots down a real BigFoot ;-)

Phil Knight, Boosters, Oregon Ducks, and money on OTL

Sunday's edition of Outside the Lines will spotlight Phil Knight, Oregon and boosters, and their money-influence to collegiate athletics. The episode airs on Sunday April 6, at 930am eastern (630am pacific).

Guests include Temple AD Bill Bradshaw, and Brad Wolverton, senior editor of the Chronicle of Higher Education. As usual, Bob Ley is the host.

And a video preview of the story courtesy of ESPN.

Prediction: Mark Few will be the next Oregon head coach!

We are big fans of the Gonzaga phenomenon, even though we call them GoneZaga every time they lose. And we are ready to make a bold prediction: Mark Few will be the next Oregon head basketball coach!

Where do we basis this bold prediction?
1) The new Oregon AD has Spokane connections

2) Bill Grier, long time Gonzaga assistant, and first-year San Diego miracle worker-coach, has bolted out of his Oregon State deal. Perhaps because the Gonzaga job will open up soon? :)

3) Mark Few has very strong ties to the state of Oregon, and the Pacific Northwest. Just like Mike Montgomery won't leave the Bay Area no matter what, we think that Mark Few won't leave the Pacific Northwest. And the Oregon job is the natural progression in his career if he wants to have a chance at the NCAA championship. The new super-sensational arena and the Nike goldmine should help a whole lot. A short bio of Mark Few at Wikipedia.

4) We are not the only ones thinking in this fashion. See what John Canzano of Oregon Live says.

We think that the failure to land Kevin Love or Kyle Singler would be ultimately what causes the end of the Ernie Kent era at Oregon. How often does the state of Oregon have two top five caliber players and yet the home team fails to get even close to one of them. That was the harbinger of doom for the Kent era at Quackville.

The only question perhaps is whether this is a bold prediction or a master of the obvious prediction :)

Arizona at Oregon

The return of the Quack Attack! Ernie Kent's booming voice was not the only thing making noise at Mac Court last night as the Oregon Ducks managed to deliver a convincing performance in the first half and keep their at-large hopes alive after beating the "Wise" Arizona Wildcats.

Arizona was playing with both Wise and Brillo-meyer so they have all the pieces back. And that's what makes Arizona's case for an at-large bid. With Nic Wise, or with Wise/Bayless playing, they have a solid at-large record. It's when those two are out of the line-up that they have as 33% record and that's what some people see when they say that Arizona is not in the tourney.

Of course who's in and out depends on the other teams on the bubble, since you don't put records if they are only that good, but you have to put 31 teams in, regardless of how good or bad their records are. The selection committee and the bracketologists cannot simply punt if they can't find enough "worthy" teams.

This puts Oregon up against Washington State, making it a very intriguing #3 vs #6 matchup on Thursday.

Meanwhile Arizona will have to hold their noses and play the play-in game, against 0-18 Oregon State. Now that's a must-win game for the Meercats. Imagine if they lost that game with their full squad! PRESSURE!

And Kevin O'Neill already has an asterisk next to his name, it's the first time in 23 years Arizona did not have 11 or more wins in the conference season. They only have *gasp* eight conference wins (8-10).

Oh this is going to be a dramatic selection sunday for sure!

Oregon at UCLA

If it wasn't for the goofing around of Steve Lavin and Brett Musburger, the first half of this broadcast would have been unwatchable. Unwatchable with capital U! But instead we have Lavin and Musburger being Comedy Central, and Lavin revealing some more details about his exit from UCLA.

But back to the game, this was a typical UCLA comeback game, a slow start, and then grind, grind, grind, tie the game, take the lead, and never look back.

If Oregon was looking for a theme, "self inflicted wounds" would be a good one. Their Mighty Mouse had his good moments, but he also had his trademark disastrous, yes disastrous decisions on offense, leading to turnovers, steals and buckets for UCLA. The type of turnovers that really hurt. Ouch for Oregon!

This means that if Oregon wants NCAA Tourney play, they need to win all three remaining regular season, and get two wins in the Pac-10 tourney against other NCAA or bubble teams. Or perhaps win it all - depending on how all the other bubble teams do.

And yes, the new black Nike uniforms with the "Princess" sparkling letters were a horrible idea. How do they design these? Do they design them in Photoshop and hit print on the cotton printer? ;-)

Washington State at Oregon

We are slightly behind as you can see :) But here we go: The battle of the contrasting style of plays, episode #23405. The run and gun Oregon Ducks hosted the Vulcans of Washington State! The game started faster than we anticipated, but sluggishness took over the second half where it took the Cougars a few centuries to go from 41 to over 42.

Despite all that, Washington State showed once again they are very capable of beating teams outside the Sweet 16. The Nike Ducks are one of the crazy teams of the year, like Texas and Xavier, that can beat almost any team on a good day, and lose to any team on a bad day. And this was not a good day for Oregon.

However, the clock is ticking for Oregon, and with the crunch in the middle of the Pac-10, an NCAA bid will be hard to come by. Unlike the many pundits who dream of 7 or 8 bids for the Pac-10, we would like to point out that the Pac-10 will get 6 bids, unless a team that is not supposed to get an at-large bid makes a run to the tourney final beating a couple of NCAA teams along the way.

Why would we say that? We are a west-coast-bias blog after all. Because unlike conference with unbalanced schedules, where at-large teams can keep on wining over non-tourney teams, Pac-10 plays a true round robin, which means there are not enough wins for seven at-large teams. The only "guaranteed" win is Oregon State. Nothing else is guaranteed. And you don't have to be a math major to realize that there's only 9 wins per week in the conference. That's all! Not enough room for seven at-large bids!

But the Pac-10 tourney could save the day for teams like Cal 420, Arizona State, Washington, Oregon, Wise-less Arizona and Hacketless-USC, especially if they don't finish strong.

OTL: Religion and the NFL while Oregon apologizes to UCLA for the ...love

Today's Outside the Lines (3pm eastern, 12pm pacific) has a centerpiece story that tackles religion and sports, and more specifically NFL players. ESPN has a video preview of this. Their big question is "why do players feel compelled to bring their faith to the field and is it always appropriate?". We blog, you decide!

More details on upcoming OTL episodes, at the OTL page.

Also in the latest OTL email message, there is a mention of the Oregon Athletics Director apologizing to Kevin Love and UCLA for all the ...love Oregon fans showed the Beached Whale and his dad, clad head-to-toe in UCLA gear.

If Kentucky fans "affectionately" call Pitino "Traitor Rick", then what nickname should Oregon fans use to call their one time great Stan Love?

USC at Oregon

USC jumped on to a lead and was so comfortable at Mac Court that Daniel Hackett was making "adjustments" in the middle of the court!

But the Nike Ducks came back when many thought all was lost. And it wasn't the run and gun, but rather Ernie Kent's hack-a-Trojan strategy, combined with a barrage of three pointers made. And it worked! The Nike Ducks made a comeback and tied the game and sent it to overtime.

After a brief scoreboard technobabble delay, the game tipped off, and the delay gave Tim Floyd time to broker a deal on the dark side of the moon, and every three pointer the Trojans took, even the wild ones, were on target. But strangely Ernie Kent did not go to the Hack-a-Trojan strategy during the overtime, and USC went back to So-Cal with a sweep.

The game started with a promise of an exciting game, then devolved into a slugfest, but picked up in the second half and turned dramatic towards the end.

So what does this mean for Oregon? Well for one thing they have to start accumulating wins. The good performances are not good enough. But having said that, this team could have beaten UCLA - if Malik Hairston did not miss the last quarter due to injury - or if the zebras did not allow UCLA to play multiple-foul per possession defense. Essentially the UCLA loss, counted for two, since that loss carried over in the USC game (and that's what Ernie Kent said).

UCLA at Oregon

Kevin Love got a lot of negatively charged love in his first game back home in a UCLA uniform. Daddy (Oregon great) running around wearing layers of UCLA clothing (according to Marques Johnson) did not help the situation at all.

But ultimately the game was decided on the court, and the Beached Whale almost had a 20-20 (24pts, 18reb) despite getting hammered by the Ducks. And E-Kent did not even play all of his space-eaters: Mitch Platt, F. Dors, and once-promising seven footer R. Schaefer (sp?).

UCLA's "defense" was exposed once again - it's really good when they are allowed to foul multiple times per possession. That wasn't the case during the USC game, and look at the result. Don't get me wrong, they do have a good defense, but what makes there defense so great is that they are fouling multiple teams.

But they can also win games in the last four minutes. This is something that both UCLA and Georgetown (eg Syracuse on Big Monday) have shown that they can do over and over. It's hard to beat a team when they have this "secret weapon" in their arsenal! Not to be confused with soccer club Arsenal.

Oregon had a great opportunity for a high profile win, but because freshman point K. Brown was too amped up, and Malik Hairston missed most of the last quarter of the game due to injury, the team had to depend heavily on Mighty Mouse. And Mighty Mouse makes a lose canon look organized and under control ;-)

Now there is some more pressure on the Nike Ducks to beat the USC Condoms. With USC "finding itself" again, this won't be easy, but it will be a good win for the Ducks. Their Pac-10 record is good - they haven't had a bad loss so far. We already mentioned that Washington played much better with Overton as the point, and that was not a bad Oregon loss. And lo and behold, Washington wins at ASU, adding another dangerous team in the Pac-10.

And before you count out the Washington Husker-Dos, remember that it was indeed another shortie point guard a few years ago that turned Washington from 0-5 to an NCAA darling, which ended up losing to Mike Anderson's UAB in an instant classic in the NCAAs. Is Overton the next Nate Robinson impact-wise? We blog, you decide!

Stanford at Oregon

This was a very well played game for the most part, playing the game the way it was meant to be played. Kudos to both teams, coaches and players for representing the game so well in front of a national TV audience on CBS Sports with the Governator (Bill Raftery) calling the game.

The offense dried up towards the end of the game (or perhaps the defense picked up), but the low turnovers made this a very pleasant game to watch.

Each team went to its strengths, Stanford took advantage of their size advantage inside, with Brook Lopez rehearsing his NBA moves against the Oregon smalls. Oregon went to their strength, the run and gun, mismatch-causing small team, with Mighty Mouse breaking ankles and Malik Hairston malik'ing the defense, and Leunen being the "tough fundamental".

But don't get me wrong, if you peruse the Oregon roster you will find lots of size there, it's just that Ernie Kent prefers to play with the smaller guys, partly because they are faster, partly because they are better than the big guys, and partly because it's cool :)

In my opinion, Stanford continues to under-achieve. Granted, they had their share of injuries and issues, but it's very rare that a team has two solid 7-footers. To not be able to capitalize on them is disappointing. It sort of reminds us of the failure of Rob Evans at Arizona State when he had a program-changing player in Ike Diogu. After one good year and an NCAA tournament bid, they were unable to capitalize on having Diogu for the next two years. Is Trent Johnson heading into Rob Evans territory? Probably not, but he has two game-changers, Evans only had one.

Oregon at Arizona

This is typically an exciting game since both teams like to go up and down up and down. Of course Kevin O'Neill's Wildcats are not as run and gun as the Lute Olson Wildcats, but that didn't stop it from being an up and down game, with Oregon being the fastest of the two and the winner of the game.

As it is typical with the 07-08 Meercats, they fell behind early in the game, as much as 20 points down. They did make a comeback, but they were never able to take over the game. The Ducks withstood the McKale bump and kept their lead and the badly needed road W.

Interestingly last year these two teams split but with each winning on the road. Arizona was without Jerryd Bayless, Oregon without space-eater Joevan Catron. Just like Arizona, Oregon choses to play small, both teams have lots of big players on the bench that rarely make it off the bench.

Oregon starts the Pac-10 season with a split, but now the Arizona State loss doesn't look as bad as it would have looked in previous years. Arizona on the other hand starts 1-1 when they were expected to start 2-0 at McKale. The tough schedule and the comebacks along with the Bayless injury will "discount" the loss but without Lute Olson the NCAA tournament selection committee may not be as generous: they have to earn their bid!

Oregon at Kansas State

They must have put something in the water they hand out at the inaugural Big 12 Pac 10 Hardwood series, because both games so far ended in overtime and in dramatic fashion. The prodigal freshman was going against the Quack Attack. Who prevailed???

The game started fun, fast and furious, until both coaches "zoned out", and used zone defenses to slow the opponent down. This worked in slowing down the game to almost a crawl and having a low first half score.

The second half was exciting however, with the teams going back and forth. Michael Beasley once again showed his "mad skillz", although some could point out that he was jumping over shorties, not players his own size, length and athleticism. But Fran Frachilla (who blogs and surfs in a swimsuit? (just testing to see if you are reading this Fran :)) has appointed Beasley the #1 pick of the 2008 NBA draft, and why not? He might be the next Kevin Garnett or Melo. Can you afford to not pick him over yet another guard or wing? Thankfully I don't have to make that decision, but NBA GMs will have to :)

I had my reservations with this season's Quack Attack, because Aaron Brooks was the glue that held last season's team together as a seasoned four year veteran college point guard. That's why I haven't given the Ducks much vote love in the BlogPoll Top 25 bloggers poll.

But after watching them for the first time this season, I was pleasantly surprised. Yes, they do have their issues, in that they lack size, but they are a versatile team with a capital T. Space-eater Jo Catron is no longer just five fouls off the bench, he has improved his game in many aspects, and showed he can have impact in the paint on the offensive end. Marty Leunen continues to be the all-around player that was advertised, but he seems to have added more toughness as showcased by his four-rebound effort at a critical time of the game while going against three Kansas State players. The Mighty Mouse may be a liability because of his size, but he is a game changer because of his size, speed and shooting. Bryce Taylor is another player that has improved his game from last year. And while Mailk Hairston, just like his other overrated teammate Joe Crawford at Kentucky, failed to meet their lofty expectations coming out of high school, he is also another solid experienced player in the rotation.

Kansas State could have easily won the game, if they could hit their free throws (they went 0 for 3 in three one-and-one attempts, essentially 0 of 6). They also made some freshman mistakes as expected, but they also showed some poise. While this team is not yet a top 25 team, there is a lot of potential as Billy Walker continues to get up to speed, and the newcomers get more acclimated to D1, and Frank Martin finds more ways to take advantage of having Michael Beasley in his line-up.

Despite the loss, this was a good game for Kansas State, although obviously a W would have been even better. Needless to say this was a good road win for the Mighty Tiny Ducks, in front of an ESPN audience.

The (Big 12 Pac 10 Hardwood) series is now tied 1-1, with Oklahoma playing USC as we speak, and ten more games are coming up in the next few games. What's different in this series is that some tams are playing more than one game, namely Arizona, Stanford and USC (assuming the Kansas at USC game is part of the series). This presumable was set up as such so that all 12 Big 12 teams would play in the hardwood challenge.