UCLA basketball, the program that has set the standard for success in the world of college basketball, has been anything but successful with Steve Alford in the leadership role.
On June 4, 2010, the architect of UCLA basketball‘s 10 national championships spanning from 1962-1975, John R. Wooden, died at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. He was 99 years old.
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At that time, Ben Howland was the head coach of the Bruins, a role he coveted as his “dream job”. Early in his tenure, Howland was asked what he would do if Wooden wanted to coach again and Howland said he would step aside and let the legendary coach take over, albeit in a very joking manner. It was good times around Westwood with the changing of the guard and it looked to stay that way.
Howland was brought in to change the culture of UCLA basketball after Steve Lavin failed to live up to the championship standards of his predecessor, Jim Harrick (the only other coach to raise a banner with the Bruins outside of Wooden).
Howland made very effective changes in his first five years, making UCLA’s defense something to be feared. By year 3, he had them in the NCAA Tournament Championship Game. In the next two years, he would go to the Final Four, making it three consecutive seasons that he achieved that feat, something that had not been been since Wooden ran things in Westwood. It appeared as though things were going back to the UCLA way… until they weren’t.
Howland was the last UCLA coach that Wooden saw in the role he made famous. After Wooden’s death, in the next three (and final) seasons, Howland went 23-11 (NCAA Tournament Round of 32 exit), 19-14 (no NCAA Tournament) and 25-10 (Pac-12 Champions and a Round of 64 exit).
The coach never made it back to the Final Four (or past the Round of 32 for that matter). After a series of bad decision on the recruiting trail, clashes with players, several notable legal troubles with his players and “burning bridges” with local recruiting pipelines, as well as a shocking expose about his reign over the program, Howland was done. He lost his players, he lost the program, he lost the fanbase and finally lost the Athletic Department..
It Has Been Years Since…
Though Howland brought success back to Westwood, he quickly lost it. All of this around the time Wooden’s health was slipping and eventually caused him to pass. Along with Howland, the ways of success for UCLA had gone and have not since been duplicated.
This is not a ghost story. This is not a tale of spirituality. It is not a narrative of the looming specter that is John Wooden, cursing the air that flows through Pauley Pavilion. That is not Wooden’s style. This is more of an odd coincidence that parallels the series of bad decisions made by the athletic department.
UCLA fans are often labeled as spoiled. This is a false assumption. Many Bruins fans, except the UCLA extremists, do not believe that UCLA needs to win a championship every year. For the most part, UCLA basketball fans just want their team to be competitive every year. It happens with other bluebloods, so why should it not happen with the program that set the standard for success among all college basketball programs?
Years since…
- A National Championship: 23 (1995)
- A Final Four: 10 (2008)
- A Regular Season Pac-12 Championship: 5 (2013)
- A Pac-12 Tournament Championship: 4 (2014)
Despite winning the Pac-12 regular season and tournament championship in 2010, the first round exit was enough for the athletic department to cast Howland out, simply because he did not live up to the standards he created for himself and UCLA in the modern era. That goes double for the current regime, but we will get into that shortly.
There is a stigma about the UCLA head coaching job, namely that it is hard to live up to the expectations brought on by previous leadership on a historic level. How can a coach succeed or been seen as successful after Wooden’s impressions on the program? Howland shot that down as he proved something very important: UCLA fans do not require championships, they just want their team to be competitive and be in the running for chapmionships. Every. Single. Season.
If other teams can do it, why can’t UCLA?
Success for Blue Bloods
| Team | Titles | First Title | *AYIBTSF | Titles Since 1995 | **AYIBTS95 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kentucky | 8 | 1948 | 8.8 | 3 | 7.7 |
| North Carolina | 6 | 1957 | 10.2 | 3 | 7.7 |
| Duke | 5 | 1991 | 5.4 | 3 | 7.7 |
| Indiana | 5 | 1940 | 15.6 | 0 | — |
| UConn | 4 | 1999 | 4.75 | 4 | 5.8 |
| Kansas | 3 | 1952 | 22.0 | 1 | 23.0 |
*AYIBTSF – Average # of years in between titles since the program’s first
**AYIBTS95 – Average # of years in between titles since 1995 (the last UCLA National Title)
Related Story: Alford likely to stay at UCLA
The above chart shows what six elite programs (aside from UCLA) have done in their history and how long it has taken them to go from championship to championship. Here we see the amount of titles, the year of their first title and the average year they go from title to title since their first.
The last two columns have to do with championships won since 1995, the last time UCLA won one. As you can see, many programs have been able to repeat their success in a short amount of time. For emphasis, it has been 23 years since UCLA raised a banner.
Though Bruins’ fans would have liked to see Howland raise one himself, they reveled in his accomplishments. Going to three consecutive Final Fours is extremely difficult to do, more difficult than just simply making the NCAA Tournament, which UCLA should be able to do every year (and not squeak in with a play-in game).
Howland brought UCLA success, but he also couldn’t back it up. UCLA had a taste of the sweet life and they did not want to let it go. UCLA appeared to be dedicated to re-elevating the status of their storied basketball program, but that seemed to come to a halt when they hired Holwand’s replacement.
Not The UCLA Way
With Howland gone, it was a chance for UCLA to build themselves back up and make a huge splash with a big time hire. The names that were swirling around the chat rooms and water coolers were a who’s who of basketball masterminds. Butler’s Brad Steven’s, VCU’s Shaka Smart and Florida’s Billy Donovan were all hot commodities at the time and did not seem out of reach for a school like UCLA to land any of them. And then they hired Steve Alford.
Unless fans were deeply rooted in college basketball knowledge, it was not likely that most Bruins fans knew who Alford was or where he came from. At the time in 2013, Alford had made his New Mexico squad competitive… in the Mountain West Conference. Though he won four regular season titles, he did not once get past the NCAA Tournament Round of 32. Even in his previous stop at Iowa (a Power 5 conference team), he did not make it to the Sweet 16.
On top of that, his troubled past at Iowa came up rather quickly at the start of his tenure in Westwood. At Iowa, Alford continually defended one of his players, Pierre Pierce, who was arrested for felony sexual assault. Shortly after being hired, Alford was asked if Wooden would have handled the Pierce case any differently. His response was not Wooden-like.
"That was an incident that happened years ago at the University of Iowa and all I can tell you with that situation is I followed everything that the University of Iowa, the administration, the lawyers that were hired, I did everything I was supposed to do at the University of Iowa in that situation. I followed everything that I was told to do."
So UCLA, which had just fired a successful coach for the regression of the program and his attitude (it was well known that he was not a “players-coach” and had rubbed a lot of people the wrong way including several high-end donors), hired a coach that did not have a great post-season resume and was not exactly coming off as a “good guy”. But all of that aside, he was Dan Guerrero’s choice to lead this program back to national prominence.
Five years later, UCLA is back to where they began. Probably a little worse off.
Stats Don’t Lie
Though there is an ocean of stats to swim through in regards to Alford’s production at UCLA, I will focus on stats that have to do with his “success” in recruiting and as well as the season as a whole, which there is a large discrepancy between the two.
Though Alford has averaged a recruiting class ranking of 10th nationally in the last five years, his teams have ranked (on average) 28th in offensive efficiency and 83rd in defensive efficiency (thanks for the numbers, UCLA B Team!) during that time. You do not see Duke, Kentucky or even Arizona doing that.
In five years, Alford has a record of 117-57 (.672), not exactly setting the world on fire. And because he has underachieved, this also means his teams have not been ranked in the Top 25 very often.
Steve Alford's #UCLA teams have appeared in the AP poll in just 34% of available weeks. The only UCLA coach since 1948 to appear less frequently in the AP poll was Walt Hazzard, who was fired after four seasons despite being a distinguished alumnus with institutional goodwill.
— David Woods (@daviddavidwoods) March 1, 2018
If UCLA was aiming for success, not only were fans correct in questioning the hire, but five years later, there is indisputable evidence that he is not a UCLA-caliber coach. Yet just over a week after the Bruins’ play-in game loss to St. Bonaventure, Alford has not been fired. Instead, it appears as if the athletic department will retain him.
The reason for this is because the AD, which is looking at the overall climate of college basketball now that the FBI has gotten involved with several programs, does not want to terminate Alford and hire a coach that could potentially have trouble follow him to Westwood.
There is also another reason. This has to do with UCLA currently possessing the #3 recruiting class in the nation. This is the best class Alford has assembled in his time at UCLA. Though a commendable task, if they do not make any noise by next season’s end, it really does not matter what the class is ranked. All that will matter is that UCLA allowed Alford to take this program on another dead-end season which will not look good for the athletic department. Alford simply has not done anything with the talent that he has had bestowed upon him and because of that, UCLA will go nowhere if this continues.
Even the 2016-17 team that brought us Lozno Ball and TJ Leaf, despite a 31-5 record, finished 3rd in the Pac-12 regular season, lost in the Pac-12 Tournament semifinals and was bounced in the Sweet 16 by an underwhelming performance against Kentucky (a team they had thoroughly beat down in Lexington earlier that season).
The Last Defense of Alford
Yet here are those that still side with Alford with the most prevalent arguments being: “He made it to the tourney in four of his five seasons”, “he did not have his full roster this past season”, “he was successful with Lonzo”, and “Wooden did not win a title until his 14th season”.
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True, but there are things that one misses when presenting these defenses. The fact that he made the Big Dance in four out of his five seasons (one could argue it was only three as he did not win the chance to “play-in” to the tournament last week) is fine for a middle fo the road Power 5 Conference team or a mid-major, but not for UCLA (sorry for sounding elitist, but this could also be argued that UCLA fans just want their team to be competitive – see the above argument with Howland). Additionally, Alford has not made it past the Sweet 16 (with any program). With top 10 recruiting classes, UCLA should have accomplished this feat at least once in the last five years.
The argument that he did not have a full roster this past season is a laughable one simply because UCLA proved, on multiple occasions, that they could rise to the challenge and put up a damn good fight, fight, fight against several top teams, sans those three players that were suspended. Against the top three teams in the Pac-12, UCLA went 4-1 (at Arizona, vs/at USC and vs Utah with a loss in the SLC). The Bruins also defeated Kentucky, who is currently in the Sweet 16 and the highest ranking team in their region.
Continuing, the fact that he had success with Ball, Leaf and the rest of the gang during the 2016-17 season is fine as he turned a 15-17 team into a 31-5 (I often used this argument as an example of how he was turning the program around… that narrative has changed since the start of the 2017-18 season), but he did not win any hardware… and that was suppose to be the best roster he had assembled in his time at Westwood. That brings up another issue.
No Bruin fan expects a UCLA coach to repeat what Wooden did (okay, maybe one or two), they just want their team, that has become the epitome of college basketball success, to continue to be just that.
In five seasons, Alford’s best team could not win the conference or get past the Sweet 16. This is why, even though he is bringing in a great class next summer, there is not a lot of confidence that he will do anything with that team next winter.
I recently wrote Is the 2018-19 Pac-12 season UCLA’s for the taking?, citing that UCLA should be better next season and could win the conference, but only because the majority of the (already down) Pac-12 could be worse. If they do not win the conference, then that will speak volumes (and fly more anger-fueled banners over Westwood).
And the argument that Wooden did not win a title until his 14th season is a weak one because in his first five seasons, Wooden won two conference titles, which is also a sign of success. Alford only has a Pac-12 Tournament Championship to his name which came in his first season, meaning that the majority of the players on that team came from Ben Howland. Since then, Alford has not been able to get UCLA a single trophy and that is why UCLA (and indirectly, the athletic department) have failed to live up to the standard that John R. Wooden set so many years ago.
Keeping Up With the Standard (That They Created)
Yes, there is a little bit of elitism in this argument, but it is one that any blue blood program would make. Once a program tastes success, they want to continue gorging on its fruits. Can you imagine what the Cameron Crazies, Wildcat Nation or the Tar Heel faithful would have to say about a coach (or coaches) that has not led their program to a title in 23 years? It would not be pretty.
UCLA basketball set the standard for success, not just in college hoops, but in the wonderful world of sports. Their feats in the 60s and early 70s will never be matched (UCONN’s Geno Auriemma notwithstanding). No Bruin fan expects a UCLA coach to repeat what Wooden did (okay, maybe one or two), they just want their team, that has become the epitome of college basketball success, to continue to be just that.
With that being said, the UCLA athletic department and head basketball coach have not done what it takes to keep UCLA relevant, and if the AD wants to keep Alford, this shows that they will momentarily continue to not do what it takes to keep the blue and gold elite. Alford has weaknesses (like teaching defense) and stated that he would make changes so that they do not occur again, but unfortunately, they have occurred again. And it looks like they will continue to occur.
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In the words of Sports Illustrated writer George Dohrmann, the author of the expose on Ben Howland, “this is Not The UCLA Way.” The spirit of Wooden has truly gone and we are left with a leader of the program that claims that a 21-12 season is in fact “good”. Maybe at New Mexico, but this is UCLA.