Oregon State Beavers: Take Notice, Pac-12

15 years.

It took the Oregon State men’s basketball team 15 years to beat a top ten-ranked opponent. It took first year head coach Wayne Tinkle just 15 games to beat a top ten team as the Beavers downed #7 Arizona 58-56 last night at Gill Coliseum. Oregon State’s win will come as a surprise to many across the college basketball landscape in a wild weekend where five of the top ten ranked teams all lost (#2 Duke, #4 Wisconsin, #5 Louisville, #7 Arizona, #10 Texas). To those who have been following the 11-4 Beavers this season, however, last night was yet another testament to the hustle and tenacity of this young Oregon State squad.

The 2014-15 campaign for Tinkle’s Beavers was supposed to be an unspectacular affair as the first year head coach adjusts to his new role with players recruited by previous head coach Craig Robinson. Yet the Beavers have surpassed the expectations of many just 15 games into the season, and it’s their defense that has been leading the way. Oregon State gives up 56.8 points per game, good for 16th in the country at the moment. For comparison, last year’s team finished 305th in the country with 75.6 points allowed per game. It’s still early in the season, but that is a monumental improvement over last season – one that explains how they could befuddle such an offensively talented team as Arizona.

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Many will look at last night’s game and see an Arizona team that underperformed, taking too many threes on offense and playing with no real sense of urgency on the defensive end, especially late in the game. The game-winning basket was a wide open layup from Oregon State’s Langston Morris-Walker with 28 seconds left. The Wildcats looked flustered in a game that they more than likely figured would not be nearly as close as it was. They shot 37.8% from the field and that was nowhere more apparent than when Arizona had the ball late on offense. They rushed perimeter shots as Oregon State employed a zone defense, not getting second chance points while getting out-rebounded 32-26.

Yet it feels like Oregon State teams should have found a way to blow a close game like last night’s, based on recent memory of the men’s basketball program. As has been established already in this article, Tinkle’s Beavers are not like teams of the past. They have risen from the ashes of their recent mediocrity, a very welcomed phoenix of a basketball program at a school that was once fueled by its prolific basketball teams. Now, I’m nowhere near ready to crown this team Orange Express 2.0, as Ralph Miller’s vaunted teams from the early 1980s are sacrosanct to Beavers fans. But there’s a murmur in Corvallis, and for once it’s coming from Gill Coliseum and not Reser Stadium.

Those 15 years between beating a top ten team were a long time to the Oregon State men’s basketball team. Since Oregon State beat the then #3 Arizona Wildcats in March of 2000, the Beavers have gone through three coaches – four if you include interim head coach Kevin Mouton. They have endured countless losing seasons and failed expectations come March – save for one CBI championship in 2009. Yet it’s easy to forget a lot of that after a game like last night. Again, this team isn’t anywhere near being a lock for the NCAA Tournament, in which they haven’t played since 1990 when Gary Payton was leading the way. The Beavers are, however, heading in the right direction, and that’s something potentially worrisome for the rest of the Pac-12.

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Oregon State has offered up many easy conference victories in recent years – games where the opposing team can pencil in the W before even taking the court. Games like a season-opening exhibition loss to Western Oregon and a 52-60 loss to an 8-7 Quinnipiac team show how this Oregon State team has a lot to work on as the season progresses. On offense, the Beavers only score 65.9 points per game. Their leading scorers, junior guards Gary Payton II and Langston Morris-Walker, average 12.3 and 10.6 points on the season, respectively. Yet, as was mentioned earlier, the Beavers’ defense is what is winning them close games and is the reason Oregon State is well above .500 at this point in the season.

By all accounts, Oregon State looks to a year ahead of schedule in their rebuilding process, and that should strike fear into their Pac-12 opponents this season. No one ever said this Pac-12 conference slate was going to be easy, and games like the Beavers win over Arizona last night prove that. There just might be very few to none of the preconceived “winnable” games for the usual conference powers like Stanford, UCLA, Washington and Arizona. To this, Wayne Tinkle and his Oregon State Beavers will do their damnedest to be a constant thorn in the Pac-12’s paw from now through March.

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