The month of March is here, but the madness of brackets is still a couple of weeks away. While we can wait patiently for Selection Sunday to finally arrive, many college basketball fans will happily keep busy by watching the endless conference tournaments taking place across the landscape over the next couple of weeks.
For the Oregon Ducks, that starts this week with Kelly Graves and the women’s basketball team tipping things off in the Pac-12 Tournament. The No. 2 seeded Ducks earned a first-round bye in Las Vegas, so they will only need to win three games in order to take down the tournament championship.
So is that a feasible accomplishment for this Oregon team that has experienced such ups and downs already this season? According to the Hotline at Mercury News, it’s absolutely in the cards. Here are their predictions for how Oregon’s path in the tournament will ultimately shake out:
No. 7 UCLA vs. No. 2 Oregon (6 p.m.)
Oregon put the hammer down in a make-up game two weeks ago, leading by 20 points at halftime en route to a 67-53 win. The Bruins can be counted on to make it closer in a rematch. But coming off a tough opener against USC, they will fall short of defensively slowing the Ducks.No. 2 Oregon vs. No. 3 Washington State (8:30 p.m.)
Washington State obviously relishes a do-over from its 83-30 mid-week disaster in Eugene on Feb. 9. But getting your wish and making something out of it are different things. The Ducks are too big and potent offensively to experience a drop of that magnitude.No. 1 Stanford vs. No. 2 Oregon (3 p.m., ESPN2)
In the end, we will see a third Stanford-Oregon meeting this season (the Cardinal won both) and the same tournament finalists from 2018-20 (the Ducks won two of three). Stanford will be up to 33 consecutive wins over Pac-12 opponents by Sunday and on a 19-game overall winning streak. Both will come to an end as the Ducks need a dramatic statement more than Stanford in order to host an NCAA sub-regional.
The reasoning, for the most part, in Oregon’s predicted victory over Stanford is the fact that the Ducks need the boost from a conference championship more than the Cardinal do at this point in time. In the latest bracket projections, Oregon was not included in the top-16 seeds in the NCAA Tournament, meaning that they would not be allowed to host their first two tournament games.
Whether that desire to get into the top-16 is enough to finally push them past the big bad Cardinal at long last is up for debate, but it will certainly be fun to watch them try.
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