Dana Altman opens up about this year’s struggles, places blame on himself

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Dana Altman is often considered to be one of the nation’s very best college basketball coaches roaming the sidelines. It’s tough to argue against it as he’s one of just five active coaches to have a winning season in 25 straight seasons. His teams are often some of the most feared teams in the month of March as the Ducks are second among all teams for the most wins in the month of March since 2011 with 60.

Altman was quick to point the blame on himself for this year’s struggles as the Ducks are in a rare position of having to play their way into the NCAA Tournament following the team’s opening round Pac-12 Tournament victory. At 19-13 the Ducks are just not as good as what was expected of them as a preseason Top 15 program and are in a situation where the NCAA Tournament may not happen this season.

“I haven’t done a very good job. Because we got good guys. They haven’t given me any problems,” said Altman after Oregon’s 86-72 victory over Oregon State in the first round of the Pac-12 Tournament. We haven’t performed at the level that I thought we should. The analogy would be an instructor who has a class and they are capable of doing B-plus, A work, and we’ve been a C team.”

Altman says some of the blame for the team’s inconsistent play this year is on the team’s players, but Altman was quick to point out his players are the ones you should not point to first when looking to who’s to blame. Altman said he’s not done a good enough job to connect with the players and put them in positions of success consistently, and their struggles on the court should fall on him first and foremost.

“For whatever reason, the connection between the guys and between me and the guys hasn’t been what it’s been in the past. And we’re real close there, if we could’ve — we had a good effort at Arizona and USC, and those were crushing defeats. And we didn’t handle them very well. And a lot of times we haven’t handled adversity well this year.”

The Ducks’ season has been filled with a lot of head-scratching results. The ducks were blown out in Portland 81-49 by BYU in mid-November. They went to the Maui Invitational in Las Vegas and walked away with two ugly losses to Saint Mary’s and Houston. The Ducks had four home losses this season, the most the Ducks have had since the 2017-18 season when they also had four losses at home and failed to make the NCAA Tournament. The Ducks have two victories over Top 15 program UCLA, a win over Top 20 USC, they’ve nearly knocked off No. 2 Arizona at their home floor, and Oregon went wire-to-wire with the defending national champion Baylor Bears in December in Eugene. The Ducks have clearly shown they can play with and even beat some of the best teams in the country. They’ve also shown bad teams can beat them as Cal won at Oregon 78-64, Arizona State swept the Ducks this year, which includes a 81-57 ​​thrashing in Tempe, and Stanford knocked the Ducks off on the road this season.

Through it all the Ducks still have a chance to right this season’s inconsistency and keep their NCAA Tournament hopes alive. That starts with Thursday night’s game against Colorado.

“So, again, all we can do is worry about tomorrow. That’s water under the bridge,” said Altman when asked about the challenges of coaching this year’s squad. “But to answer your question, it’s on all of us. And I share the brunt of the responsibility because I’ve taken a lot of credit over the years for when we have finished strong; and so when we don’t, that’s as much on me as it is on anybody.”

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