Oregon State is not the only team to play quite a few close conference games this season.
It seems as if every Pac-12 men’s basketball game winds up coming down to the wire.
This season, 47 out of 78 games have been decided by single digits.
The parity shows in the standings, where a group of teams are bunched in the middle. There are no guaranteed wins.
Last week, Oregon, which currently leads the league with a 10-3 record, was taken into overtime by last-place Washington State.
“It’s been really interesting to see and you don’t have time as a staff or a team to take a breather and say, ‘OK, we’re playing X. That should be a win,’ " Oregon State coach Craig Robinson said. “You can’t think that way."
Robinson said the Pac-12 is getting stronger.
The conference has been weakened in the recent past by losing quite a few players to the NBA.
The parity, combined with a lack of a highly ranked team or two, hurts the Pac-12’s national reputation.
“It’s been really exciting to see so many games decided at the very end of the game," Robinson said. “If we had enough teams ranked, that would help us as a conference. It would be more like the Big Ten, where you have a lot of ranked teams playing each other closely."
