Dana Altman Said He Wasn’t Going Anywhere. That Was 2024.

In March 2024, standing inside Matthew Knight Arena, Dana Altman got asked about retirement rumors and shut them down. “I’m not going anywhere,” he said. “Unless this school tells me I’m not here. Not retiring, that’s for sure.”

At the time, Oregon was 19-10 and in danger of missing the NCAA Tournament for a third straight year. That same month the Ducks won the Pac-12 Tournament, and they made the next two NCAA Tournaments. He was right, for two and a half more years, which in college basketball counts as a long time.

Last Wednesday, he retired, effective immediately.

The timing is the story. Altman announced it on Oct. 7, eight days before Oregon’s first exhibition (Seattle, this Thursday) and less than four weeks before the opener against Montana on Nov. 2. Tony Stubblefield, his longtime assistant, will coach the whole season as the interim. Oregon will run a national search after it, and CBS Sports has already floated names for that one, including Josh Schertz, Eric Olen, Bryce Drew and Leon Rice.

It has been a long week to be a Duck. The basketball coach retired on Wednesday, and the football team turned it over seven times against UCLA on Saturday.

“I love coaching, it’s what I know best and what I’ve been fortunate enough to do for almost five decades,” Altman said. “But I know this is the right thing to do at this time.” He called it one of the two toughest decisions of his career. The other was leaving Creighton for Oregon in 2010.

What he leaves behind

He leaves as the winningest coach in program history: 382-182 in 16 seasons, 147 wins ahead of Ernie Kent in second place, with 20-plus wins in 15 of them. He took Oregon to nine NCAA Tournaments and five Sweet 16s, and his 2017 team won a school-record 33 games on the way to the Final Four. Counting Marshall, Kansas State and Creighton, he won 792 games over 37 seasons as a Division I head coach. He has been running a program somewhere since 1989, when he took over at Marshall. “It’s been the honor of my life to coach the Ducks,” he said. Athletic director Rob Mullens said the record book “tells only part of the story” and thanked Altman and his wife, Reva.

He also leaves at a rough moment. Last season Oregon went 12-20 through a pile of injuries, the worst of his 16 years in Eugene, and 5-15 in the Big Ten. Nine players left through the transfer portal and three graduated, so only four are back. The newcomers include Fred Payne from Boston College, Jasper Johnson from Kentucky, Tyrone Riley IV from San Francisco, Andrew Meadow from Boise State, Sean Stewart from Ohio State and Dwayne Aristode from Arizona. The Columbus Dispatch picked Oregon 14th in the Big Ten. And the early signing period is in November, so every recruit Oregon talks to between now and then is going to ask who the coach is.

The interim

Stubblefield has been on Altman’s bench for 13 of the 16 years, in two separate stints. In between, he got three seasons as DePaul’s head coach, went 28-54 and was fired in the middle of the third one. Altman called that a “raw deal.” Andy Katz called this job Stubblefield’s mulligan, which sounds about right. Mullens said Stubblefield “knows this program as well as anyone” and is “the right person to lead the Ducks this season.”

According to Katz, Stubblefield gave Altman space over an August break to decide whether he wanted one more season. Stubblefield said walking away “was one of the hardest decisions he’s ever had to make.” He also told Katz the plan for this group: lean on its depth, with “eight to 10 players” who can affect a game, press more and be more disruptive on defense.

If you’re keeping a list, late-fall retirements are a genre now. Tony Bennett walked away from Virginia on Oct. 18, 2024. Bruce Pearl left Auburn on Sept. 22, 2025, and handed the job to his son. Bennett still holds the October record, by 11 days.

My take

It’s mixed. Sixteen years and a Final Four earn a lot of respect, and I don’t know what’s going on in his life. Nobody outside that program does, and I wish him well.

But those transfers picked Oregon in the spring, and a lot of them committed to play for Dana Altman. Now they’re weeks from the season with a different coach and nowhere good to go. That’s rough on the players. It kind of feels like bailing on the ship.

He said in 2024 that he wasn’t going anywhere. He meant it, and he stayed. He just picked a strange week to go.