Oregon Ducks Basketball: Who is Dana Altman?

When the University of Oregon fired longtime men's basketball coach Ernie Kent in March, the Ducks had their sights set on bringing in a recognizable, big-name coach to resurrect the program and inspire fans to buy tickets for the school's brand new arena in 2010-11.

Mission: Not accomplished.

Don't misunderstand, though - Dana Altman is a good coach, and he's potentially a perfect fit for Oregon. He'll bring in an old-school mentality and a sense of discipline that very well could turn around the program.

But those are things that will have to happen with time, with success ... with winning. And they'll have to happen despite a truck-load of expectations that will have the new coach on the hot seat from day one.

In the meantime, Altman's name alone will not fill up the new Matthew Knight Arena.

Not the way Tom Izzo's, Mark Few's or Billy Donovan's would've.

It became clear, after former Oregon athletic director Pat Kilkenny - who headed up the search for the school - was turned down repeatedly by the coaches he was trying to woo, that the Ducks might have to do something the Ducks don't generally do: settle.

As in, settle for second best. Or, in the case of Altman, fifth or ninth or 12th best, depending on which stories you believe about the number of coaches Kilkenny pitched.

This is an athletic department that's essentially run by Nike boss Phil Knight, whose fingerprints, and financial contributions, are all over the University of Oregon's various high-priced, high-quality venues, including the new arena being erected on the edge of campus that bears the name of Knight's late son.

This is an athletic department that took out a skyscraper-sized advertisement for a quarter of a million dollars to plaster a poster of 2001 Heisman hopeful Joey Harrington on a building in Times Square.

This is an athletic department that was sick of seeing up-the-road rival Oregon State win national titles, and recognition, in baseball, so Knight and Kilkenny engineered a plan to dump wrestling and bring back baseball after a 28-year hiatus.

And it's an athletic department that decided the born-again baseball program needed a brand-spanking-new stadium in which to play, cracked the earth on the $19.2-million project, then went out and lured two-time national coach of the year George Horton away from his alma mater, Cal State Fullerton, to coach at Oregon.

So, yeah, the Ducks don't settle. When you've got deep pockets, you don't usually have to.

But money wasn't enough to lure away any of the big-name basketball coaches Kilkenny was eyeing, so Oregon was forced to look in a new direction.

And as a result, the Ducks just might have ended up with a pretty darn good coach.

They hope so, after signing Altman to a seven-year, $1.8-million-per-year, incentive-laden contract.

The new coach brings in an impressive list of accolades, including a stretch of 13 consecutive postseason appearances (seven of those in the NCAA Tournament), a 327-176 record in 16 seasons as the Bluejays' coach and a string of 11 straight seasons with 20 or more wins.

His former players say he's all about discipline, precision and hard work, and he'll have the Ducks running the court and playing full-court defense and, well, he just might make the team fun to watch again.

Kent had an unprecedented run at Oregon, reaching the NCAA Tournament's Elite Eight twice during his 13 years as head coach. But Kent's last two Oregon teams sealed his fate with inconsistent, uninspired play that produced a total of nine Pac-10 Conference wins in two seasons (7-11 in 2009-10 and 2-16 in 2008-09), as well as losses in three of the last four games against rival Oregon State and finishes of 10th and ninth place, respectively, in the conference standings.

Kent, himself a former Oregon basketball player, left as the all-time winningest coach in program history with a 235-173 record and with the Pac-10's highest NCAA Academic Progress Rate, a complicated formula that, in a nutshell, means he graduated most of his players. The rate, 975, is almost 50 points higher than the national average.

So Altman's task is tall, and the expectations are clear: Win. Turn the program back into a competitor.

And do it or else, because the Ducks had little problem dismissing an alum who just happened to own the most wins in school history and churned out diploma-holding basketball players like few other major programs in the nation.

If there's one thing Altman has in common with Kent, it's a propensity to march along the sideline during games, shouting instructions to his players and objections to the referees.

There could be another reason Altman won't sit much during Oregon games, though - that coach's seat's a little hot, right from the start.

Source:
Dana Altman Biography, Ducks Men's Basketball, GoDucks