UCLA Basketball: Should UCLA Retire Don MacLean’s Jersey? – An Investigation

The Blueblood Standard

Those who oppose retiring MacLean’s jersey would point out that, at a program as storied as UCLA Basketball’s, “just” scoring the most points in school history isn’t enough. Thus, the first context examines the leading scorers who played for other bluebloods. I evaluated the 10 programs with the highest all-time win percentages in D1. This is what I found:

• Dan Issel‘s Kentucky jersey: retired
• Tyler Hansbrough‘s UNC jersey: retired
• Danny Manning‘s Kansas jersey: retired
• J.J. Redick‘s Duke jersey: retired
• Lawrence Moten‘s Syracuse jersey: NOT RETIRED (more on this shortly)
• Don MacLean’s UCLA jersey: NOT RETIRED (hopefully you knew that by now)
• Darrell Griffith‘s Louisville jersey: retired
• Surprise #1: Western Kentucky is on this list. Surprise #2: Jim McDaniels and Courtney Lee are co-leaders with exactly 2,238 points each. The Hilltoppers retired both of their jerseys.
• Sean Elliott‘s Arizona jersey: retired
• Chris Mullin‘s St. John’s jersey: retired

The most striking non-WKU-related thing about that list is that every one of those programs retired their leading scorer’s jersey except for UCLA and Syracuse. Furthermore, UCLA is the only program on that list that didn’t at least try to do so (Syracuse told Moten that his jersey was going up and then it never happened because of some strange scheduling conflict that happened three years ago).

If you have some reservations about criteria that says Western Kentucky is a blueblood, feel free to evaluate the top 10 programs in terms of overall wins. Swap out Louisville, WKU, and Arizona for Temple, Notre Dame, and Indiana. However, you’ll find that the latter two programs have a no-retiring-jerseys policy.

Verdict: MacLean gets his jersey retired 8* times out of 10 (*9 if you include Syracuse’s effort).

Next: The Conference Standard