Not a great weekend for Oregon baseball, but Oregon track is doing it's best to make us forget. Let's get to the quack:
- Ashton Eaton and Brianne Theisen started the Pac-10 championships off on the right foot, winning the decathalon and heptathalon, respectively. Eaton won his third straight Pac-10 title in the decathalon yesterday, and immediately called his mom afterwards. And not just because it was Mother's Day. He calls his mom, who he is very close with, after every meet. Eaton accomplished his goals for the competition, as he won the decathlon, while conserving enough energy to compete in other events as the Pac-10 championships continue next weekend. Most impressive of all this? Eaton put up the second best score in the world this year, while not going all out.
- Meanwhile, Theisen became the second Duck to win back-to-back Pac-10 heptathalons, in her impressive performance. She scored 5,917 points and beat the nearest competitor by almost 500 points. The Ducks also got some help from Marshall Ackley, who took third in the decathalon, and Erin Funkhouser, who PR'd in the heptathalon and took fifth, helping give the Ducks a strong head start into the rest of the championships next weekend.
- Unfortunately, Oregon baseball didn't fare so well as they finished their worst week of the season. Oregon was swept by the Beavers, as they lost three games in walk-off fashion to the Beavs, two of them in extra innings. To his credit, Horton is taking the full blame of the losses, as he "let some things slide." Errors killed Oregon during the series (they had 5), and Ducks didn't take advantage of multiple opportunities throughout the series, including a terrible base-running blunder that killed a 9th inning rally in yesterday's game. But for all the bad, the Ducks have a lot they can take from the series. For all the struggles, the Ducks never gave up, coming back in the 9th during the Saturday and Sunday games, even though it wasn't enough. And despite the frustration, the Ducks were in every game, something we couldn't say last season. Oregon has four non-conference home games this week, one on Tuesday against San Diego and a weekend series against East Tennessee State, so they'll have a chance to get back on track very soon.
- Bob Rickert is on the warpath regarding OSU's recent legal troubles, and has had multiple blog posts on the topic over the weekend. To add insult for the Beavs, on Friday evening, OSU QB Peter Lalich received a DUI near Shasta, CA. And while on some level it's fun to point and laugh, the only benefit of this is that now their fans will shut up. Complaining about media coverage of the two universities, or some perceived double-standard, is not beneficial to either side. You know why OSU isn't receiving media coverage? Because they aren't Pac-10 champions, and haven't shown an ability to compete on a national level in the last decade. Oregon will receive more media scrutiny, that's just the way it goes. But remember, media coverage goes both ways. When you screw up it's amplified, and when you do well, it's amplified, and Oregon has benefited to great degree from that amplification over the past decade.
- In a bit of Pac-10 stadium house-keeping, Oregon is replacing it's field turf this week, and Cal will be playing in AT&T Park during 2011 (Cal plays at Oregon that year) as work takes place to improve the dump that is Memorial Stadium.