Oregon Can't Afford to Overlook Utah in Regular Season Finale

Seemingly nobody wants to take the bull by the horns and win the Pac 12 this season. At least three teams had a shot within the last week to take control of the conference but all three lost and now the regular season title will come down to the final games on Saturday.

The championship, and top overall seed in next week’s conference tournament, will be decided Saturday night and it’s fitting seeing how the Pac 12 played out this year. Oregon has arguably the easiest path to claiming at least a share of the regular season title as they travel to Utah but they shouldn’t take it that way. Plenty of other teams have overlooked the easier half of the Rocky Mountain road trip and almost every one of them struggled.

The Ducks are coming off a dismantling at the hands of Colorado, which put them in this position to begin with, so their confidence is a little shaken heading into their season finale. Oregon had one of its worst offensive performances of the year in Boulder, going 9-22 from the FT line and 2-12 from beyond the arc, so they are due for a bounce back game.

However, like they learned on Thursday, a team won’t just hand them a conference title and Utah will surely give them a fight. Like most teams Utah plays a lot better at home than they do on the road but even in their early matchup in Eugene the Utes gave the Ducks all they could handle. Utah even had an eight point halftime lead in that game but they couldn’t sustain the advantage on the road eventually losing by nine.

Oregon has to regroup quickly because Utah is a feisty bunch and if the Ducks overlook them, like many other teams do, they will be scratching their heads once again wondering what went wrong.