Jan 2, 2015; Boulder, CO, USA; UCLA Bruins head coach Steve Alford reacts on his bench late in the second half against the Colorado Buffaloes at the Coors Events Center. The Buffaloes defeated the Bruins 62-56. Mandatory Credit: Ron Chenoy-USA TODAY Sports
Famed Spanish philosopher George Santayana once said that those who don’t learn from the past are condemned to repeat it. It is only by understanding how we got to the present that we can understand how to proceed into the future.
UCLA basketball fans have become all too aware at this point that head coach Steve Alford and UCLA are bound by ink for the foreseeable future, regardless of results. We’ll leave the intricate X’s and O’s analysis for another time. What we want to do is look at the circumstances surrounding Alford’s hiring and the contract that he was awarded in order to see if there’s any silver lining we can glean or if the long-term future of the program is as bleak as it currently appears to be.
How did Alford get the job?
On Monday, March 25, 2013, three days after UCLA’s embarrassing loss to Minnesota in the NCAA Tournament Round of 64, UCLA athletic director Dan Guerrero fired Ben Howland and began a wide-ranging search for a replacement who could restore the Bruins to prominence. All reports indicate that Guerrero decided to swing for the fences with the hire, with a candidate list of big names like Billy Donovan and Rick Pitino.
Ultimately, once those fantasies were crushed, Guerrero zeroed in on the two hottest mid-major coaching candidates in the country for the job: VCU head coach Shaka Smart and then-Butler head coach Brad Stevens. Stevens was always the top candidate, but Smart quickly removed the option of Plan B when he negotiated a pay raise from VCU rather than interview for the UCLA job.
Once the courtship of Stevens floundered and Wichita State advanced to the Sweet 16, leaving its coach Gregg Marshall unavailable to interview in the quick timeframe UCLA was looking to hire a coach, the inexplicably impatient Guerrero was in a bind. It seemed that Guerrero hadn’t planned on striking out on both Stevens and Smart and felt embarrassed, thus rushing Guerrero into action trying to find the first acceptable coach who would take the job immediately so Guerrero could save face after he’d been turned down by each of his A-list candidates. Some of you might be shocked that Guerrero could ever strike out on his first choices for a hire and then move recklessly onto the first person that seems willing to take money from UCLA.
Dec 17, 2014; Boston, MA, USA; Boston Celtics head coach Brad Stevens watches from the sideline as they take on the Orlando Magic in the first quarter at TD Garden. UCLA made Stevens its top priority during the 2013 coaching search before he turned the Bruins down. Mandatory Credit: David Butler II-USA TODAY Sports
Enter Steve Alford. UCLA shocked its fanbase and the college basketball world on the morning of Saturday, March 30, 2013 when it announced it had hired a man who had not been linked to the job in any way previously and had just agreed to a contract extension with New Mexico. Alford admitted that UCLA had not been in the picture for him when he re-upped with UNM and essentially said that UCLA only turned to him after its pursuit of Stevens had flatlined. Alford also mentioned that his son Bryce would be decommitting from New Mexico and following him to UCLA.
While UCLA presented Alford as a successful Mountain West coach who could recruit Southern California and play an up-tempo style that would be pleasing for fans, others pointed out his lack of success in the NCAA Tournament at Iowa and New Mexico, mentioned his lack of experience recruiting high major talent even in Southern California, and suggested that Alford’s arrogance and stubbornness could get in the way of his efforts to win in Westwood.
Why did UCLA give him that contract?
Once Guerrero zeroed in on Alford as his man, Alford had all the leverage in the room from that point on. Alford had just agreed to a 10-year, $20 million contract extension with New Mexico less than two weeks before agreeing to renege on that deal and take over for Howland at UCLA instead. As a result, at the time of negotiations, Alford didn’t seem to have any real motivation to leave Albuquerque and would have needed to be blown away by what UCLA put on the table before he’d consider leaving what was essentially a lifetime contract at UNM. And boy, did UCLA ever blow him away with its offer.Â
UCLA Bruins
The basic terms of Alford’s contract were 7 years and $18.2 million in salary, coming out to $2.6 million a year before bonuses. Those basic terms alone made Alford one of the ten best paid coaches in college basketball and the highest-paid employee of the UC System. But that’s not the part that bothers anyone.
The part, however, that makes the stomachs of Bruin fans churn is this: per the terms of Alford’s original contract, UCLA and Alford agreed to a mirror-image termination clause in which each side would owe the other an agreed amount of money through the life of the contract should either party breach it before its conclusion. The side breaching the contract (either UCLA by firing Alford or Alford by leaving UCLA) would owe the other $10.4 million if the breach occurred before April 30, 2016; $7.8 million between May 1, 2016 and April 30, 2017; $5.2 million between May 1, 2017 and April 30, 2018; and $2.6 million through the end of his contract after April 30, 2018.
To make matters worse, after a Sweet 16 season in 2013-14, which used to be cause for anger at Steve Lavin but is apparently now laudatory for Steve Alford, UCLA took Alford’s contract, including the mirror-image termination clause (which we’ll just call Alford’s buyout because it’s patently obvious that Alford isn’t getting pursued for another job any time soon), and rolled it over another year. As a result, Alford’s $10.4 million buyout will remain intact until April 30, 2017 rather than 2016 and each subsequent drop in the buyout is pushed back by one year as well.
It’s quite understandable why Alford would agree to this contract: as a result of it, he’s the most contractually secure coach in all of college basketball and possibly sports in general. But why, in the name of all that is good and holy, would UCLA voluntarily agree to bind itself to Alford in such an extreme way?
It’s clear that UCLA wanted to make sure that Alford wouldn’t leave Westwood in the lurch that way he did Albuquerque. But New Mexico is not a destination job in the same way UCLA is. UCLA is one of the kings of the sport, one of the enduring iconic programs in college basketball. If things are going well for a coach at UCLA, he’s likely going to need to be dragged out kicking and screaming rather than ogling other jobs in small college towns.
Aor 2, 2013; Los Angeles, CA, USA; UCLA Bruins athletic director Dan Guerrero speaks at a press conference to announce the hiring of Steve Alford (not pictured) as mens basketball coach at Pauley Pavilion. Mandatory Credit: Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports
Two other things also seem clear in hindsight: 1) that Dan Guerrero and those advising him valued and admired Steve Alford as a coach far more than the vast majority of basketball observers and UCLA fans did; and 2) that UCLA’s administration had become so insecure about the allure of the UCLA job that they essentially approached the negotiations with the mindset of a teenage boy with uncontrollable acne who hoped a girl would just look past his flaws and like him back, as opposed to what North Carolina did with Roy Williams, Kansas did with Bill Self, or Kentucky did with John Calipari, in which those programs handpicked the creme de la creme of the coaching ranks for jobs that should be considered college basketball royalty.
Why did UCLA decide to extend that absurd contract?
This question has a slightly simpler answer than the rest (and no, it’s not just that Alford’s agent is a wizard): Alford took a team with three-first round NBA Draft picks (Kyle Anderson, Jordan Adams, and Zach LaVine) and two pretty skilled seniors (the Wear twins) to a Pac-12 tournament championship win over a drastically overrated Arizona team, two wins in the NCAA Tournament over double digit seeds in San Diego (a recipe for success if there ever was one), and a Sweet 16 loss to #1 overall seed Florida in a game that was very winnable for UCLA had Alford not put himself in a bind by allowing Florida to make a late 2nd half run while Bryce Alford (and his matador defense) was on the floor in place of Anderson.
All of this is meant to say that UCLA’s administration is either really stupid or has embarrassingly low expectations for the program if such minimal accomplishments really called for Steve Alford’s buyout schedule to be pushed back another year.
Where do we go from here?
Dec 28, 2014; Tuscaloosa, AL, USA; UCLA Bruins coach Steve Alford reacts to a turnover during the second half against the Alabama Crimson Tide at Coleman Coliseum. Mandatory Credit: Kelly Lambert-USA TODAY Sports
Half a season later, we now see what the Alford era has wrought in its second year once the best holdovers from Ben Howland left and it truly became Steve Alford’s UCLA basketball program. It’s essentially the opposite of everything good about the Howland era (commitment to defense, fundamentals, and athleticism) and a redux of everything bad about the Howland era (arrogance, stubborn dismissals of criticism, selfish offensive play, internal turmoil, inability to recruit locally, inflated perception of the national appeal of UCLA to elite out-of-state recruits leading to lack of depth), all mixed in with an unhealthy dose of nepotism.
Looking at the remarkably hasty hiring process, the misevaluation of Alford’s suitability for the job, and the eagerness with which UCLA has allowed Alford and his agent to rake the university over the coals in negotiating Alford’s contract and extension, it seems that the consistent themes to date have been incompetence and insecurity on the part of Dan Guerrero and the UCLA athletic department. It’s also safe to say that those traits have permeated from the Morgan Center into the floor at Pauley Pavilion.
As Santayana said, you must learn from the past in order to avoid making the same mistakes in the future. As a result of UCLA’s recent history, UCLA’s storied basketball program sits captive in the stockades, nervously awaiting what is to come as the executioner’s blade hovers perilously close to its neck. It should have never gotten to this point and it is to the eternal shame of Chancellor Gene Block and Guerrero that it has, but the past can’t be changed.
Since UCLA has no fiscally sensible alternative going forward but to let Alford build what he can through the latter part of the decade, the only important question now is this: having made the mistakes he’s made at UCLA so far, will Steve Alford learn from them and make things better in the future?