A Moderately Uncalled for Arizona Wildcats vs. Oregon State Preview

A Moderately Uncalled for Oregon State vs. Arizona Basketball Preview

Ryan Ringdahl | January 10, 2018

The dirty little secret of the pay-for-play scandal that rocked college basketball lies in the fact that schools like Arizona aren’t under the gun for funneling money to a player’s family. It’s that schools like Arizona are getting raked over the coals for being cheap.

You see, the NCAA has very detailed protocols for almost everything, including how to shovel buckets of money to the families of star players. According to the NCAA, schools can’t just write a family a check, they must provide a real job in addition to the money. At minimum, schools shall provide families of star players one of the three allowed assistant spots.

It’s a fairly new rule, and it’s why Michael Porter Sr. didn’t get the coveted Associate Trainer job at Kentucky while his kid bumped his draft stock via Coach Cal’s weekly ESPN Plug. Trust us, allegedly shuttling an alleged $50k to an alleged point guard is significantly cheaper than the $375k yearly salary, country club membership, courtesy car, four season tickets to men’s and women’s basketball, and access to all other home sporting events that Mizzou threw at Porter Sr to borrow his kid for a year two minutes.

Oregon State doesn't play Arizona’s cheap game. The Beavs know there’s no such thing as halfway a crook so when they found a generational high-school talent that was going to swing the fortunes of their program and steer them back to the promised land of madness they threw the whole caboose at the fam. That’s how you lock up a head coach like Wayne Tinkle for $6.6 million dollars.

Wayne Tinkle looks like a Marvel super-villain who owns an Enterprise Rent-a-Car franchise. Seeing him without a cowboy hat makes people uncomfortable without ever knowing why. His wardrobe is the costume closet for the off-Broadway Guys and Dolls tour. And he happens to have a son, Tres Tinkle, who was in the Rivals top-100 and now averages 18 points, 7 rebounds, and three assists per game for the Beavers.

But wait, there’s more. Wayne Tinkle’s assistant, Stephen Johnson Sr., has TWO sons in the Rivals top-100 who now play in Corvallis. Oregon State pays Johnson $135,000 a year. He had no Division-1 coaching experience prior to joining Tinkle’s staff.

Okay, okay. So perhaps this is a bit unfair. Wayne Tinkle was a respected head coach at Montana before taking the Oregon State job. And Stephen Johnson was the head coach of Cal State Los Angeles for nine years before arriving in Corvallis. But still, if a lower-tier, Power Five school wanted to institute some creative accounting to allow for an influx of talent it would look similar to Oregon State’s recent actions.

Wayne Tinkle has also pioneered a bold and innovative two-man system that we won’t say isn’t built to maximize his large adult son’s stats and tease him a spot in the League.

Usually in basketball, a two-man game is a moment where two players manipulate one side of the opposing defense through repeated interactions, but Tinkle has supercharged that concept into an entire system. Instead of just leveraging a momentary advantage, OSU has developed their entire attack around two guys: 6’8 Tinkle 2 and, guess who, 6’4 junior guard Stephen Thompson Jr. Between the two of them, Tinkle and Thompson are responsible for 46.3% of all shots, 48.1% of all makes, 50% of all points, 66.6% of all 3pt makes in conference play. They never come out of the game (averaging 37.5 minutes per game in conference play) and are the only players introduced during pregame.

Okay, again. Perhaps a bit unfair. Tres Tinkle is good and he's a natural for the two-man game. Also, we can’t actually verify that pregame bit. In our defense, no-one has ever watched the pregame intros -- they are busy staring at Wayne Tinkle, who looks like the romantic fanfic version of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

The Beaver’s hopes for this season took a hit when starting point guard Jaquori McLaughlin went down with an injury. Seth Berger, a 6’7 graduate transfer from UMass, averaged 7.7 minutes a game through the first 7 games and 16.6 minutes since McLaughlin’s injury. He has added some needed juice to the slowest paced team in the PAC12, attacking the offensive boards with vigor. Coach Thompson’s younger son Ethan hasn’t missed a beat, starting every game as a freshman and looking ready to step into his brother’s role as half of the Tinkle Twosome next season. But turnovers are a problem. Yes, this team has some talent but they don’t take care of the ball.

On the inside, 6’10 junior Drew Eubanks brings the rim protection, upping his blocks per game from 2 to 3 in conference play so far. 6’11 junior Gligorije Rakocevic trades that rim protection for a little more stretch on the offensive end, but that eats into the limited 3s Tinkle 2 gets to jack, so the magnificently monikered Montenegrin only sees about 10 minutes of the court per game. Eubanks will be the X Factor in this game. He’s talented and has an outside shot of joining the NBA as a free agent. But if Oregon State is going to win they will need to bang the boards. The Beavs are 212th in the nation when it comes to defensive rebounds and they face a tall Arizona team that just got taken to the woodshed by Sean Miller for poor play in Boulder.

Conclusion

Oregon State isn’t as good as their record suggests, that’s not a good sign. Their record suggests that they are pretty mediocre. The Beavers really hoped to survive their cupcake early schedule (the 341st toughest schedule according to the inestimable KenPom.com) with fewer than 3 losses. It didn’t happen. That’s not a promising sign for what isn’t a kind conference schedule featuring 2 games against Arizona, ASU, USC, UCLA, and Oregon. OSU has gone 8-2 at home this year, split their neutral-site games (beating Marist and St Louis; losing to St Johns and Long Beach State), and lost the only true road game they have played at the mighty Kent St. Golden Eagles.

Still, the Beavers recently beat Oregon, Colorado, and they took Utah to the wire. They can be frisky and, for all our sarcasm, Wayne Tinkle is a good coach who will employ the dreaded Zone defense against Arizona. But road trips are a dangerous mistress. And Oregon State's previous road games involved losing to schools from the states of Long Beach and Kent, so a visit to the desert to meet Sean Miller’s most recent collection of lottery picks in the most hostile environment west of Kansas is a daunting task.