And the Oscar goes to…

Oregon. Once again Oregon State has quietly accepted its role as the little brother to Oregon. Losing to Oregon in last night’s Civil War proves we just don’t care enough about winning at Oregon State. Gary Payton was in attendance and we had every reason to have a strong game where we took a modest lead and held on to it for most of the game. Instead, however, we played like we never wanted to be up by more than a couple points and as if we were more comfortable in the role of playing from behind and only hoping to win if all went great down the final stretch. It didn’t.

At the crucial moments of the game with less than 10 minutes to go we started to fall further and further behind until it was too much with too little time remaining. Craig Robinson needs to man up along with the players and start being pissed about losing. This is getting to be far too much and we are crawling ourselves into another CBI appearance in the worst fashion. I have become so tired of our losing ways it is becoming hard to be upbeat at all about our sports. Even baseball allowing multiple games where the opposing teams are allowed to score 15+ runs seems ridiculous. The baseball team deserved to fall out of the rankings. Something is very wrong with OSU Athletics. We have become a culture of being completely OK with losing. Riley’s record the past two seasons would have seen him fired at 97% of universities in major conferences. Yet OSU is OK with being in that 3% minority that has to have the dead horse kicked again and again before it ever wants to admit it must make changes.

With basketball now starting a major slide what excuses are we going to be OK with? I am not OK with what is happening. If Craig can’t recruit more winners next year who know how to win and expect to win the close games that are over half your season, then he needs to check himself out of Corvallis or realize he isn’t a very good in-game coach. Atleast Larry Scott wants to up the standard for minor bowls and force schools to achieve better than 6-6. Since Riley’s contract is supposedly based off bowl appearances for extensions then hopefully that would mean he would have to win atleast 7 wins for an extension. Because Riley is the type who would be likely to finish many seasons close to .500 this is great news to those of us who don’t want to be stuck forever with a guy who figures out a way to get a few 6-6 seasons along the way. 7-5 is much more respectable and the absolute minimum for a decent coaching performance that should receive any consideration of benefit.

Ultimately, I think the whole culture at OSU is sick and tired. De Carolis is too one-dimensional and afraid to make bold statements about turning the culture into a winner. He and Riley and now even others like Robinson have become infected with the disease that mediocrity at best is fine at OSU.