EUGENE -- By Monday afternoon, after Oregon's fans and players had left Matthew Knight Arena, only women's basketball coach Kelly Graves was left on the court, staring into a television camera.

"Four years ago," ESPNU analyst Andy Landers said live on-air into Graves' earpiece, "Oregon basketball was broken." Graves nodded. He was only being interviewed because things, of course, had changed.

Two weeks earlier, in Tucson, the Ducks had celebrated their first conference title in 18 years. Eight days before, they'd stormed a court in Seattle after their first Pac-12 tournament title. And an hour before, they'd jumped out of their seats on the arena's floor after Oregon earned a No. 2 seed in the NCAA Tournament.

Women's NCAA Tournament

Spokane Region

At Matthew Knight Arena, Eugene

2 p.m. PT Friday:

7 Green Bay vs. 10 Minnesota (TV on ESPN2)

4 p.m. PT Friday:

2 Oregon vs. 15 Seattle U. (TV on ESPN2)

Graves broke out a Cliff's Notes version of UO's turnaround. It helps having three all-Pac-12 players, the conference freshman of the year and the most accurate Division I three-point shooter.

And also, he said, "my staff, I give them so much credit. They've worked their butts off."

Hearing that, that same staff looked up from their Macbooks to the mounted flat-screen in their bunker-like meeting room down an arena hallway.

They also heard when host Maria Taylor ended the interview by wishing Graves luck as the Ducks began their scouting. Less than a minute later, his earpiece out and microphone detached from his zip-up, Graves rounded a corner on the arena's ground floor to do just that.

He joined his assistants in "Scoop Headquarters," the ground-floor meeting room that had become UO's nerve center for its NCAA scouting, ever since the bracket's reveal.

"Let's go," he said, taking a seat. "How we doing?"

UO women's basketball staffers (from left) Xavi Lopez, Jodie Berry, Jackie Nared and Jess Harlee watch head coach Kelly Graves during an ESPNU appearance Monday.

DOWNLOAD AND GO

If the NCAA Tournament is indeed a "Big Dance," then it is a kind where no one shows up with a date of their choosing.

Its selection committee, chaired this year by Hillsboro native and Nevada associate athletic director Rhonda Lundin Bennett, always unveils its 64-team women's field on a Monday. By Friday, games begin between opponents that often have little familiarity. In between, staffers across the country scramble to assemble scouting reports on short notice, all searching for an edge to spark a deep March Madness run.

At Oregon, that process began Monday with the click of a button.

Within minutes of Oregon learning it would be a No. 2 seed hosting a four-team regional and open against 15th-seeded Seattle University UO's staffer in charge of creativity and video, Jackie Nared, was in "Scoop Headquarters" downloading the first of three Redhawks' WAC tournament games onto Graves' laptop. It took 45 minutes for the first game alone, four times longer than usual, likely because hundreds of assistants across the country were downloading their own games at the same time from Synergy, an online scouting service UO uses.

One chair to Nared's right, assistant Jodie Berry used Synergy to study Seattle. One seat to her right, assistant Xavi Lopez began his scouting report on Green Bay, whom the Ducks could potentially meet Sunday in the round of 32. At the other end of the table, assistant Mark Campbell had drawn the scout of Minnesota, Green Bay's opening opponent.

The Ducks enter the tournament with the highest seeding in school history and a school-record 30 wins. But any pressure from higher expectations, and potentially duplicating last season's unprecedented Elite Eight run, wasn't apparent around the conference table. For as often as Graves has called his roster loose and relaxed, his staff is, too.

Small-talk occasionally veered away from basketball. Berry, who affectionately calls coworkers "bro," asked a staffer to check in on her 7-year-old sons, who were staying busy by watching iPads down a hallway. Graves dished on the 10 movies he watched on his recruiting trip to Australia last week (he liked "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri").

Expecting a war-room feel? The Ducks' NCAA preparation was more akin to college classmates working on a group project.

"Pretty boring," Graves said. "Everybody on their own computers."

It wasn't always this way. Decades ago, when Graves was at Saint Mary's and Gonzaga, Selection Monday was a scramble.

"You would literally find anybody that you know, shirt-tail friends, 'Hey can we have your tape?'" Graves said. "Then they'd have to make a copy of the video, VHS, and then put it in the mail and send it."

"Oh my gosh," said Nared, a former Westview High star, from across the table.

"VHS!" said Jess Harlee, a former West Virginia player who, as a graduate manager, helps track UO's block-outs and rebounding. "That's amazing."

Before the rise of online scouting services such as Synergy and Gamebreaker, Graves said, companies filled the information void by offering hard-to-find game tapes for a price, sometimes $100 per VHS or, later, DVD. At smaller schools, scouting multiple games from three potential opponents during an NCAA Tournament's opening weekend could take a significant bite out of the budget. Coaches would then edit those tapes into smaller chunks of key possessions.

Even if it was just a "verbal scout" offered by a friend in the coaching industry, Graves said he always managed to open an NCAA Tournament with some bit of intel, and it has shown. He's 11-9 all-time in the tournament and is the only coach to take two double-digit seeds to the Elite Eight in tournament history.

As a general rule, coaches often do not give out scouting information on teams within their conference -- it remains Oregon's rule under Graves -- but there was always someone with an in.

"It sure made it more exciting, didn't it, Jodie?" Graves said.

"It was a rush," said Berry, who has worked for Graves since 2003, without looking up from Synergy's breakdown of Seattle. "A rush."

STARTING FROM SCRATCH

"Scoop Headquarters" was named four years ago when Graves arrived with a staff seeking to ferret out as much new information as possible -- "scoop" -- on anything that could turn around a program without an NCAA Tournament appearance in nine seasons. The inside joke became formalized when Campbell showed up one day with a black sign emblazoned with the nickname. It still sticks to the top of a door.

Though coaches have formal offices across the Willamette River, at the athletic department's Casanova Center, assistants and staffers say they spend a majority of their time here, in the glass-walled room that is just steps from UO's locker room. It is technically a shared space, used by UO's men's and women's basketball and volleyball programs.

It has a long conference table, a pair of well-worn basketballs on the carpet, the wall-mounted TV and a constantly humming printer in the corner. Patches of its white walls have turned a darker shade by dry-erase markers sketching plays. Some of their outlines are still visible.

By 4:45 Monday afternoon, assistants were gathering scoop on their assigned opponents. When Graves begins studying an opponent, he looks at field-goal percentage first and points per game to get a sense of pace. Fouls, turnovers and three-pointers -- the latter of which he calls "the great equalizers" -- can lead to a loss any time of the year, "but especially in games like this," he said.

Berry learned to scout at Gonzaga as a volunteer from assistants such as current Colorado coach JR Payne.

"I looked over everyone's shoulder all the time," she said.

On Monday, with her scouting report due to be presented to the team within 48 hours, Berry began by pulling the last 50 shots of every player in Seattle's rotation using Synergy's massive database that breaks down teams to the most granular of levels using pre-edited video and reams of data. How does a team's eighth-best player play the pick-and-roll? It has that.

She then looked at how Seattle's offense and defense played against man-to-man and zones. Lopez, studying Green Bay, prefers to download a player's past 20 clips.

"In the Pac-12 it's different because you already know a lot of the players so much," Lopez said. "But this is starting from scratch."

Campbell's scouting education began at Saint Mary's, when he served as an assistant to men's coach Randy Bennett. At Oregon State under Scott Rueck, he learned how to look for weaknesses that could help OSU's 2-3 zone. Now in his fourth season at Oregon, he deconstructs teams by identifying small tendencies -- which shoulder a forward likes to shoot over in the post, and which direction ballhandlers prefer to drive -- as a way of seeing the big picture.

"The individual part tells a story and you put the whole puzzle together of how that story fits into their offensive scheme," he said. "Just like we run a set and have a few specific sets for Lexi Bando to get shots, another well-coached team is going to have sets to get this kid the ball on this spot on the floor.

"You learn who the coach trusts in which situations in crunch time. With today's technology, you can identify it and it's kind of mundane and boring, but you watch enough of it, you learn a team's DNA."

But such a thing as too much scoop exists.

Coaches have to find the sweet spot of delivering just enough information to players, but not so much that it could cause them to be overwhelmed. For years, Graves and his staff have given players the day off following the selection show, using those Tuesdays to distill the mountains of information compiled from various sources into a digestible scouting report. This week, UO coaches broke down Seattle over lunch Tuesday at a Mexican restaurant not far from Matthew Knight Arena. The following day, they began doling out the information to players.

"We are not a team that is going to really go in depth," Berry said. "We want to give them main concepts and a couple different things they'll see."

Junior guard Maite Cazorla, Oregon's best defender, and sophomore guard Sabrina Ionescu, the Pac-12 player of the year and a finalist for numerous national awards, have reliably shown they can absorb more information than most, coaches said.

"I watch film and imagine it, so when I'm actually in the game I know they're going to right, or like to do right-to-left crossover," Cazorla said. "For some people, too much information is bad. You start thinking too much. To me, I really like it."

UO's Jackie Nared, Jess Harlee and coach Kelly Graves work Monday afternoon in Matthew Knight Arena.

TWO-GAME TOURNAMENT

When ESPNU's selection show ended, no one turned off the TV, changed the channel or turned down the volume. That's how midway through the scouting session, the staff wound up watching Dwight Stones' call of the end of the men's mile at the indoor track and field championships. A pair of Ducks runners were in the field, which wasn't lost on Graves.

"That's the cool thing," he said. "Our kids are good, at every sport."

Yet Graves and his staff were brought here because, for a long stretch, women's basketball was one of the lone exceptions. At the time of Graves' hiring, the Ducks had one winning season in their last seven. The hiring search was meant to find a coach they believed could unlock its potential.

"We have all the things you need to win championships," senior women's administrator Lisa Peterson said in a school release in 2014.

Four years later, a path to an NCAA championship is more viable than ever yet remains blocked by heavyweights such as Connecticut, Louisville and Mississippi State -- all three of which have beaten Oregon handily in the past year. Oregon would to win its Spokane Regional, potentially getting past top-seeded Notre Dame, just to earn a potential rematch with the Huskies in the Final Four.

Graves wasn't thinking that far ahead Monday.

"I think we have a tough region," he told his staff. "Two-game tournament."

By 6 p.m., talk turned to dinner. Graves was planning on picking up Italian takeout from Beppe and Gianni's. A men's basketball staffer, graduate manager Patrick Scully, dropped by to offer help and was quickly assigned downloading Minnesota's last three games.

By 6:30, Graves was walking out of the arena, laptop in hand, answering his phone's Bob Marley ringtone. Don't worry, about a thing.

If there was stress, he wasn't showing it.

"I think these guys do the best in the business at scouting," Graves said before leaving. "They do a good job."

Said Berry: "No pressure."

-- Andrew Greif

agreif@oregonian.com

@andrewgreif