Pape Jam should be so much more.

Byline: Ron Bellamy / The Register-Guard

No matter the outcome of Saturday's matchup between Oregon and Marshall in the Pape Jam in Portland, the Ducks have already lost something.

An opportunity. A chance to capitalize on the momentum generated by last year's tremendous game against Kansas - which drew 20,762, the largest college basketball crowd in state history - and make the Jam something special.

This doesn't mean Marshall can't give the Oregon men's team all it wants in the Rose Garden on Saturday. That's not the point. The point is that Oregon hoped to follow last year's Jam with Michigan State, or Oklahoma, Oklahoma State or even Marquette, and this is a marked lowering of expectations.

In the end, the Ducks got Marshall out of desperation, and not without gratitude. The resolve should be to never be desperate again. A high-profile opponent should already be locked up for next year, and another for the year after.

They aren't. Work's being done, but no deal yet.

In fairness, the Kansas experience was somewhat of a fluke. It wasn't a yen for the Northwest, but a promise to provide a Portland game for hometown recruits Aaron Miles and Michael Lee, that led then-KU coach Roy Williams to consider the Jam.

And the game was already scheduled by March 2002, when the Jayhawks ousted Oregon from the NCAA Elite Eight, making the Portland rematch a promoter's dream, so compelling that CBS made it a national telecast.

In fairness, too, the Ducks aren't yet a big enough national name that Kentucky-Oregon, for example, screams national showcase, or that the Wildcats would see a lot of upside to playing Oregon out here, even though UO coach Ernie Kent is lobbying UK coach Tubby Smith and is willing to go to Lexington first.

The other thing you need to understand about the Jam is that it technically isn't Oregon's event. Oregon has a contract with ESPN Regional to stage the event - it has four years remaining - and ESPN Regional puts together the matchups, as it does for other events it controls.

The ESPN Regional connection got Oregon into that ugly game with Cincinnati

in the Meadowlands last season, and produced the Oregon-Alabama pairing in its Las Vegas event this season. Kansas City's Feist Shootout, where Oregon returns the KU game next weekend, is also an ESPN Regional event.

But ESPN Regional failed to get a headline-type deal done for the Oregon men in this year's Jam. Michigan State, Oklahoma State, Oklahoma and Marquette seem to have been, at various times, on the table, but despite what interest may have been perceived, nothing got signed.

Pete Derzis, senior vice president for ESPN Regional in Charlotte, N.C., cited "a variety of factors," including uncertainty among schools about the status of "exempt" tournaments that don't count game limits, which delayed scheduling.

Whatever the reasons or excuses, it was ESPN Regional's job to get this done, and Oregon's responsibility to make sure it got done, and it didn't happen. The result - this scramble to fill what should be a prime position on the Oregon schedule - is unacceptable for a basketball program and athletic department that have set the bar higher.

"In my opinion, we can survive this, but not two or three years in a row," Oregon athletics director Bill Moos said. "This needs to be a marquee event, which it will be, featuring marquee opponents."

As Kent put it: "We just got stuck a little bit this year, and we need to make sure it doesn't happen again."

Moos said the Portland market is huge for Oregon, and the doubleheader presence of the Pape Jam - ideally, in big-time games for both the men's and women's teams - is part of expanding Oregon's fan base and corporate support.

Kent emphasizes that he's willing to make an investment to get a Jam opponent with name recognition. Which means he'll take his team to play the opponent first - and on a campus site, where the going is invariably tougher - to get a team with Big 12, Big Ten, ACC or SEC-like credentials.

Discussions are under way about Oregon traveling to Illinois next season, to play the Fighting Illini in the United Center in Chicago, in exchange for Illinois coming to the Jam in 2005. Which doesn't fill the Pape Jam void for 2004.

"I'm concerned that I don't have it nailed down," Kent said, "but I know everybody is working very hard to get it nailed down."

Said Derzis: "We've had discussions with many, many high-caliber programs about the 2004 event, and we're engaged with people about 2005 and 2006." He estimated that a deal for an opponent for next year's Jam will "probably get done in the next couple of months."

Moos and Kent said putting together a star-quality Jam will be important even after Oregon's new arena opens in 2006 (the scheduled date, anyway), when the additional challenge will be to get a marquee name into Eugene as well. Moos said he's had discussions with his counterpart at Indiana about the Hoosier men and women coming to the Jam. Kent has lobbied Jim Boeheim of Syracuse and Williams, now at North Carolina, as well as Smith at Kentucky.

Moos, who said Oregon is discussing a home-and-home football deal with Tennessee, would hit quite the home run if he could get Tennessee (and its tremendous women's basketball program) into the Jam as well.

Such as it is, the Oregon schedule this season - the Ducks are playing two fewer nonconference games, the penalty for violating NCAA schedule limits - is more than reasonable for a team that lost a star point guard to the NBA a year early: Fresno State as an opener, top-ranked Kansas, Alabama.

But a year ago, Oregon drew more than 20,000 to the Jam; this year projections are for half of that. Such is the credibility of Oregon basketball that Saturday's crowd may turn out to be more than the Ducks have drawn in the pre-Kansas Jams - the previous record was 9,231 for Massachusetts in 2000 - but the drop-off squanders the momentum for the event generated last year, and that's disappointing.