Oregon's Pac-10 foes upgrading.

Byline: Ron Bellamy / The Register-Guard

The going will be tougher for the Oregon men's basketball team, and the Ducks haven't even lost a Luke yet.

Coaching changes at UCLA and Washington State will make those programs better, the questions at both places being simply how much and how quickly.

In Ben Howland and Dick Bennett, respectively, those schools have hired proven, successful, veteran coaches. You knew the Bruins were going to go that way, after the venture with Steve Lavin. You couldn't envision that the Cougars would be so fortunate.

Start with the Bruins. There's too much talent there, and too much talent potentially drawn there by those four letters, UCLA, and all they mean in college basketball, for the Bruins not to be back challenging for Pac-10 championships again.

The relevance for Oregon is that beating the Bruins - five straight over the past two seasons, unprecedented in the rivalry - has been fairly essential to Oregon's success. Without those wins, there's no Pac-10 title a year ago, no Pac-10 tournament title this past season, a whole different feeling.

The Lavin Era was bad for UCLA, but good for Oregon, the same way that the tenures of football coaches Jim Lambright at Washington and Paul Hackett at Southern California opened a window of opportunity for the Ducks in that sport, one that's narrowed with the presence of Rick Neuheisel at Washington and Pete Carroll at USC, coaches who have taken better advantage of the natural resources of those programs.

Howland, with his California background and his success at Pitt, has been a name mentioned prominently in connection with the UCLA job since the Lavin Watch began months ago, or so it seemed. But in getting Bennett, the former Wisconsin coach who took the Badgers to the Final Four in 2000, WSU pulled off a coup that was surprising, in every sense; not quite the Beavers getting Dennis Erickson in football, but in that ballpark.

Conventional wisdom was that the Cougars, having gone outside the family, as it were, with disastrous results when they hired Kevin Eastman and then Paul Graham, would go after someone with Palouse ties - perhaps Don Newman, the former UO assistant.

Conventional wisdom was that the Cougars would go after a recruiter - a salesman, to bring in talent and bring back fans.

Conventional wisdom was that this was a job for a younger guy; someone with the energy to make that drive between Pullman and Spokane again and again, and with the determination to bounce on those little Horizon flights to Seattle as often as it took to get recruits.

So the Cougars hire a guy who's pushing 60 and who resigned from his last job because of burnout?

Sure. It's the best move the Cougars have made in basketball since hiring Kelvin Sampson in 1987.

Because Bennett, just on coaching, makes the Cougars immediately better. They'll play defense, they'll be deliberate on offense, they'll take good shots, they'll shorten games against teams with better talent and sometimes find a way. (See Utah, Rick Majerus, you know the story. ...)

All of a sudden, the trip to Pullman - never high on the list of any Pac-10 team - got less fun.

Will this be rollicking, Showtime basketball? Not a chance. But it might be the perfect fit for Pullman; an us-against-the-league mentality that will grow if Bennett gets some wins there, and gives players and fans reason to believe. Get the Cougs closer to .500 overall next season, and to the NIT in three years, and Bennett will have succeeded.

Along the way, the Cougars will mess up seasons for other teams.

Both the Bruins and the Cougars figure to be much better in two or three seasons than next season; hence, some urgency for the Ducks to get back to the NCAA Tournament next season - thus further strengthening the foundation and continuity of the UO program - and to forge ahead briskly on construction of the new arena.

Because for every program in this league on the way up, there's another on the way down.