Altman just lost 2 home games to WAZZU and Oregon State. Fire Altman

I acknowledge the sarcasm here, but I still want to make a couple notes.

This was apparently the first time that the Cougs have won against Oregon at home. Maybe they meant first time in the Altman* era, or first time in the Mathew Knight arena but substantial nonetheless.

Cougs are a really talented team, will get better over the next few years.

Oregon is really hurting right now with the constant covid pauses and injuries to their players, really a shame given that they were a solid title contender/PAC-12 representative.

Sure, but let's acknowledge a few points here:

1. Washington State is more talented than usual but not really talented (maybe 1 NBA guy in Abogidi). Bonton has been a sub 50% EFG guy his entire career.
2. Oregon trailed at the half with Duarte playing
3. Oregon had plenty of talent in that game. Richardson, Kepnang, Terry, Figueroa, Lawson, Omoruyi are all either blue chip recruits or proven high major scorers. That's more than enough talent to not drop back to back home games to Oregon State and Washington State.

There's been this acceptance that Altman is the best coach in the league and it's not close. You could very well make that case, but it's not a landslide. The reality is his program has been slowly trending down since that final four team which had 5 pros (Dorsey, Brooks, Bell, Boucher and Pritchard). I know they won the league last year, but that was just an outstanding job by Pritchard to carry that team. I'm very curious to see what his teams look like in the post Pritchard and Duarte era. Altman can coach, but let's not pretend he hasn't wasted talent is is some genius at building rosters.

Remember you're not allowed to practice during COVID pause either friend.

So say you're Altman, focusing on your starters, running your practice the way you do. Covid hits, damn shame, go into lockdown. You open back up - 2 of your starters can't play due to injury and the other 2 due to covid protocol, you haven't had any time to prepare for this WITH your team, bench players thrust into game time environment for their first basketball in two weeks.

Next week comes, COVID again, gotta shut down your program again - so much for getting your bench up to game speed. You come out of pause, play the Cougs... And the rest is history.

Look, my point here isn't to write an apology for Oregon, they're a good team with capable players all around, but it's just to say that I acknowledge how difficult a situation they coulda been in in these games.

WSU played great basketball, they're a helluva team - but Idc what P12 team you take, force em to miss 3 weeks of practice and then play w/o 3-4 of their starters in a game - that's not a recipe for success.