Bill Oram: Was Elite Eight loss the end of Oregon State’s run ... or just the beginning?

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Back in October, Pac-12 coaches picked the Oregon State women’s basketball team to finish 10th in the dying conference.

How lucky for them there won’t be any future conference meetings where they have to look Scott Rueck in the eye.

On Sunday, OSU’s season ended with the Beavers among the last eight teams in the country to still be playing. They tussled with unbeaten South Carolina until the final minutes of the regional final, grabbing a national network audience by the lapels, and doing it all without a single senior on the court.

They were an out-of-nowhere juggernaut that is not going away.

The Beavers will be back.

Right?

Please?

This was a talented, gritty and enormously likable Oregon State team. One can only imagine how much better it could be with another year of development.

“Oregon State is going to be a team to really hone in on next season,” ABC announcer Ryan Ruocco gushed.

And in a sane world, you could confidently say he’s right. Their top nine scorers all have eligibility remaining.

But college sports left the world of reason and sensibility long ago.

So, the end of the season also means confronting the realities Oregon State now faces with the dissolution of the Pac-12 and the stopgap move to the West Coast Conference in the age of name, image and likeness offerings.

“Certainly, there’s things out of our control,” Rueck, the Beavers coach, said this week.

The ways conference realignment has devastated Oregon State University are varied and many, but causing the premature breakup of this Beavers women’s team would perhaps be the cruelest twist of all.

This is a team that deserves to play on.

Maybe not this season. They encountered a giant on Sunday. South Carolina managed to keep the Beavers at arm’s length, even though the Beavers, as has been their trademark all season, refused to go away.

They had four possessions in the third quarter when they could have tied the game or taken the lead. They entered the fourth quarter trailing by 12 but rallied to cut the deficit to four.

If you watched the Beavers throughout their 27-win season, you recognized that fight from their win over UCLA when Talia von Oelhoffen shot the lights out in the second half, and in narrow losses to USC and Stanford without Raegan Beers. You saw it when they came back from a nine-point hole entering the fourth quarter of the Pac-12 tournament game against Colorado that they won in double overtime.

As the women’s game has taken center stage this March, Oregon State was a bit of an outlier among all the big names present at the Elite Eight. They don’t have players who have crossed into mainstream celebrity, at least not yet.

Their best players don’t have mega-NIL deals.

This Elite Eight has given us Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese, JuJu Watkins and Paige Bueckers. UConn and USC and LSU. It’s given us Kim Mulkey and the thinkpieces she inspires.

But it also gave us a tremendous run by an Oregon State team that earned a seat at the same table.

The Beavers play an infectious brand of basketball. They are disciplined on offense and relentless defensively. They speak often of how much they like each other and it showed on the court.

“Everybody needs to get to know this team,” Rueck said. “Everybody needs to watch this team, and everybody needs to be like this team. The world would be better if everyone focused on this instead of a lot of the other things.”

Was he talking about the toxic discourse that has sprouted up around the women’s game? Or the world in general? Whichever it is, maybe both and all, the OSU women might just be the antidote.

So was Sunday the end for this team’s run? Or just the beginning?

UItimately, only the players on that roster will decide that.

It’s fair to wonder if the Beavers can grow as much in the WCC next year as they did in the Pac-12. They were no doubt readied for their March run by their rigorous conference schedule. Outside of Gonzaga, OSU won’t be tested in the way they were in their run-up to the postseason this season.

If I’m wondering that, some of the players must be, too.

But if there is a college team you can believe would buck the trends of major college sports and not pursue those flashier NIL opportunities or higher-profile programs and tougher competition, it would be these Beavers.

They’ve already done it once. I wrote last week that their decision to stick together after a 13-win season and 11th-place finish a year ago made them the face of the resistance.

“The grass is green where you water it,” von Oelhoffen said after Sunday’s loss.

Oregon State reasserted itself on the national stage this season, and with full buy-in from its biggest contributors, the Beavers could push it even further by running it back. Next season would open with legitimate Final Four aspirations.

Consider the leaps Timea Gardiner made from her first year to her second. By next season, she could join Beers as an All-American. Donovyn Hunter, the point guard from Medford, will be ready for a more prominent role, as well.

Oregon State got this far by sticking together, why stop now?

Bill Oram

Stories by Bill Oram

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