Kent, Oregon overcome adversity with 14-1 start

	Ernie Kent has led the Ducks to a 14-1 start this season, including Saturday's upset of then No. 1 UCLA. John W. McDonough/SI
	MAILBAG Seth Davis will periodically answer questions from SI.com users in his Hoop Thoughts column. Your name: Your e-mail address: Your home town: Enter your question:

In March 2003, Oregon played UCLA in the Pac-10 tournament amid considerable speculation surrounding Ducks coach Ernie Kent. By that point UCLA's Steve Lavin was a dead man walking (the Bruins' one-point loss would turn out to be Lavin's last), and Kent, who the year before had led Oregon to its first Elite Eight since 1960, was a red-hot commodity. Thus the chatterheads wondered: Would UCLA try to poach Kent from Oregon when the season ended?

UCLA hired Ben Howland, of course, and Oregon fans breathed a sigh of relief. So it's ironic that when those same two teams met last Saturday in Eugene, they again took the floor amid speculation regarding Kent's status. Only this time, the chatter was much different.

That's because last spring, after Kent failed to guide his team to the NCAA tournament for the third straight year, Oregon athletic director Bill Moos decided not to roll over the coach's standing five-year contract for the first time in Kent's nine-year tenure. Conventional wisdom now holds that Kent needs to make the tournament this year to save his job. Never mind that before he took the Ducks to the tournament three times between 2000 and 2003, they had been there just once since 1961. He needs to win now, or he's gone. Or so the chatter goes.

The fact that Moos, who hired Kent in 1997 and has been one of his strongest supporters, is retiring in late March just as the annual coaching carousel will be heating up has only added fuel to the fire. (A successor has not yet been named.) Indeed, when I spoke with Kent on Monday, two days after Oregon's dramatic 68-66 win over the undefeated, and top-ranked Bruins, I couldn't help but ask if he had seen the prediction made by my colleague Grant Wahl in SI's year-end issue stating that Mike Montgomery, whom Kent once worked for as an assistant at Stanford, would succeed Kent at Oregon this spring. "My wife showed it to me when I walked in the house," he answered with a chuckle. "It's not like I haven't seen that before. In the past it was [Gonzaga's] Mark Few coming in, or [Wichita State's] Mark Turgeon. That stuff doesn't bother me."

The bottom line is this: Kent, who played guard at Oregon from 1973-77, is a victim of his own success. Between 1998 and 2003, he led the Ducks to three NCAA tournaments, won a Pac-10 regular season title and tournament crown, was named the league's Coach of the Year, went to an NIT Final Four and had three players (Luke Ridnour, Luke Jackson and Freddie Jones) taken in the first round of the NBA Draft. Then, during the 2003-04 season, came the ultimate kiss of death: Kent signed a highly acclaimed recruiting class headlined by 6-foot-6 swingman Malik Hairston, a Parade and McDonald's All-American from Detroit who was instantly hailed as Oregon's best recruit in three decades. Though Hairston was a superior athlete as a freshman, his skills were not very polished, and like most freshmen he was not ready to carry a young team through the Pac-10. As a result, the Ducks finished a disappointing 14-13.