Oregon State and Wayne Tinkle are parting ways, which means Tinkle is apparently going to have to live for a while with this sentence from Wikipedia:

“In the 2021-22 season, Tinkle broke his own record for most losses in a single season by a major conference coach.”

But today, we’ve come to praise Wayne Tinkle, I guess, not to bury him.

Without a doubt, a good percentage of Beaver fans are pleased to have the plug pulled on Tinkle, who has a 176-204 record over 12 seasons. That’s understandable. Most of it’s been a grind, an exercise in not being good enough, playing in an unattractive old arena, being the out-of-the-way school in a game with mostly an urban calling.

His was a funny tenure, a profile in extremes – 5-27 and 3-28 seasons (gaaack), the latter featuring 10- and 18-game losing streaks. But the counterweights were an NCAA-tournament team in 2016, and the out-of-the-blue run to the Elite Eight in 2021.

I’d argue that the sum of it all, while hardly Duke-worthy, isn’t anything Oregon State ought to be ashamed about.

Look at the broad perspective. I was around Oregon State a lot during the Ralph Miller heyday from 1970-1989, when the Beavers were ranked No. 1 for eight weeks of the 1980-81 season, when you couldn’t get a seat in Gill Coliseum, when the pep band blared Queen’s “Fat Bottomed Girls,” and the program was the talk of the West Coast.

It was never going to end. Until it did.

Miller retired, turning the program over to assistant Jim Anderson, and after a debut 22-7 year fueled by the final season of Gary Payton, the program plunged into the dumper. Soon the Beavers were dreadful, 6-21 by 1994, and thus began a seemingly endless cycle of coaches who proved to OSU fans they didn’t know how good they’d had it.

Ritchie McKay did a fractious, two-year blow-by. Jay John authored a 2008 team that went 0-18 in the conference. Craig Robinson was a curiosity, President Obama’s brother-in-law, but not especially a notable basketball coach.

Along came Tinkle, a Spokane product who did his apprenticeship at Montana. Much of his pathway at OSU was built on coaches’ sons – Tres, his own; and Stephen Jr. and Ethan Thompson, sons of assistant Stephen Thompson.

Tinkle’s second team, in 2016, crashed the NCAA tournament. A lot of Beaver fans had forgotten what it was like; it was their first appearance in 26 years.

But he followed with that 5-27 monstrosity, and after a few middling years, things really got weird in 2021. UCLA’s Jules Bernard, a 74-percent free throw shooter, stepped to the foul line with a few seconds left, his team down a point in a Pac-12 tournament opener with the Beavers.

Bernard missed the first attempt, made the second, the game went to overtime and OSU prevailed. Suddenly, the Beavers were golden. They blew through Oregon and Colorado to win the conference title and the NCAA-tournament berth, then upset Tennessee, Oklahoma State and Loyola of Chicago to get all the way to the Elite Eight.

In eight days, then, Tinkle had won exactly as many NCAA-tournament games as Ralph Miller did in 19 years at OSU.

There’s considerable belief that athletic director Scott Barnes was ready to fire Tinkle before that March blitz. Instead, he gave him another four years and a deal worth $17.2 million. Talk about timing.

Now the Beavers are up against it, playing in creaking Gill Coliseum, a fieldhouse built in 1949. Worse, they’re swimming against the modern-day college athletics riptide, the one where players go where they get paid the most. Imagine where they’d be if somehow they had retained players like Tyler Bilodeau (UCLA’s leading scorer at 17.9 points a game) and Jordan Pope (13.0 at Texas).

Yes, Tinkle’s run at OSU had grown somewhat stale. But those three NCAA-tournament wins are 20 percent of the program’s total, not bad when you consider that in Slats Gill and Miller, two Naismith Hall of Fame coaches, you’re talking about 55 years of OSU basketball.

Next year, the Beavers go into what looks to be a salty new Pac-12 Conference, one that will include Gonzaga and the best of the Mountain West. Big picture, OSU needs to assess what’s a realistic expectation.

There’s a pretty vast middle between Naismith Hall of Fame and 3-28. Whatever that cutoff, Tinkle might just have achieved it.