Cronin Takes Over UCLA Basketball Program That Has One Post-Wooden National Title: A 44-Year Odyssey

Today's hiring of Mick Cronin as UCLA men's basketball coach provides an opportunity to dissect a cold streak in Bruin basketball, namely one national championship in the past 44 years, following a Golden Age of 10 titles in 12 years (1963-64 to 1974-75). Cronin succeeds interim coach Murry Bartow, who succeeded Steve Alford, who was fired this past New Year's Eve. 

Alford's Bruin teams made the NCAA Sweet Sixteen three times in his five full seasons at the helm, a better record than Cronin's in getting to this round. Developments in Westwood over the past four months naturally raise questions over the state of the program and the demandingness of the fan base.

Lurking behind any discussion of UCLA basketball, of course, is the program’s success under the legendary coach John Wooden. It was under Wooden, who ended his 27-year stint on the Bruin bench with the aforementioned 10 national championships in 12 years. The tenth title (in 1974-75) came in particularly dramatic fashion, as Wooden had announced shortly after UCLA’s win in that year’s national semifinal that the upcoming championship game vs. Kentucky would be the last game he would ever coach.[1] 

The Bruins rarely lost at all in the early 1970s, compiling an 88-game win streak that ended in 1974. Further, a new ESPN.com ranking of all 81 NCAA men's hoops champions in history (the most recent entry being Virginia) placed Wooden-era UCLA teams in the 1st, 3rd, 5th, 6th, 11th, 17th, 18th, 19th, 23rd, and 37th positions.

Presumably, few UCLA fans are today clamoring for Bruin coaches to defy reality by winning 10 national titles in 12 years. However, that seemed to be the standard in the mid-late 1970s. Wooden’s immediate successors, with records decidedly better than Alford’s, felt the heat harshly and quickly and left for other gigs. 

Gene Bartow (father of Murry), the first post-Wooden UCLA coach, went 27-5 and made the Final Four in 1975-76, then went 24-5 in 1976-77. There was no third year in Westwood for Bartow, as he left to become the founding coach of a new program at the University of Alabama-Birmingham.

The next coach, former Bruin assistant Gary Cunningham, went 25-3 and 25-5 the next two years (making the Elite Eight in 1978-79), before leaving for a small college in Oregon to launch what became a long career in Division I athletic administration. According to Los Angeles Times reporter Mark Heisler’s 1996 book They Shoot Coaches, Don't They? UCLA and the NCAA Since John Wooden, Cunningham had actually decided after one season to give it up, but secretly told UCLA he would coach one more year to give the school more time to find its next coach. 

Former UCLA and NBA player Keith Erickson, in his book Champions Again! about the 1994-95 Bruin team, simply noted that Wooden’s immediate successors “were at the wrong place at the wrong time” (p. 66).

UCLA has now had 10 head basketball coaches  in the 44 seasons since Wooden retired, including the interim skipper Murry Bartow. Only once since Wooden’s retirement has UCLA won a national tile, in 1995 under Jim Harrick. Post-Wooden Bruin teams have appeared in three national championship games (1980, 1995, and 2006) and six Final Fours (1976, 1980, 1995, 2006, 2007, and 2008). Only one of the 10 coaches, Ben Howland, brought back a sense of sustained success (albeit without a national championship), leading the Bruins to three consecutive Final Four appearances in 2006, 2007, and 2008. 

The questions concerning the past four decades of UCLA basketball abound. In the following sections, I raise and attempt to answer these questions as best I can.

Why hasn’t UCLA produced at a higher level over the past 44 seasons?

Coaching

Could UCLA’s failure to contend for more post-Wooden national championships stem from a lack of coaching talent? One way to evaluate general coaching ability – independent of how a given coach did at UCLA – is to examine his coaching record in other jobs. First, a good coach, given sufficient time to recruit and implement his or her system, should be able to win a sizable majority of games just about anywhere. Second, UCLA offers many competitive advantages in recruitment and resources (e.g., championship legacy, location in a large city, nice campus, good academics), so coaches’ records in their non-UCLA head coaching jobs arguably offer a more accurate picture of their underlying abilities absent these advantages. Of the nine post-Wooden coaches (excluding Murry Bartow), seven held head-coaching jobs at other schools. The following table shows their records.

How UCLA’s Post-Wooden Coaches* Fared at Other Places

Coach (UCLA Years)	Other Jobs	Record (Non-UCLA)
Gene Bartow (1975-76 – 1976-77)	Memphis, Illinois, UAB	440-243 (.644)
G. Cunningham (1977-78 – 1978-79)	---	---
Larry Brown (1979-80 – 1980-81)	Kansas, SMU	220-83 (.726)
Larry Farmer (1981-82 – 1983-84	Weber State, Loyola-Chicago	105-156 (.402)
Walt Hazzard (1984-85 – 1987-88)	---	---
Jim Harrick (1988-89 – 1995-96)	Pepperdine, Rhode Island, Georgia	279-172 (.619)
Steve Lavin (1996-97 – 2002-03)	St. John’s	92-72 (.561)
Ben Howland (2003-04 – 2012-13)	N. Arizona, Pitt, Mississippi State	233-147 (.613)
Steve Alford (2013-14 – mid 2018-19)	Missouri State, Iowa, New Mexico	385-206 (.651)

   *Excluding 2019 interim coach Murry Bartow.

One can safely say that these coaches represented a range of abilities and accomplishments, but some were clearly excellent coaches. Larry Brown, who later won an NCAA title at Kansas and an NBA title with Detroit, would have to be considered among the all-time coaching greats on the court. However, his wanderlust – having coached nine NBA and three college teams – and record of NCAA rules violations detract from his accomplishments. Harrick and Howland, two of UCLA’s better post-Wooden coaches in terms of postseason success, also had various off-the-court problems (Harrick, Howland).

The remaining coaches were, to my knowledge, free of scandal. Gene Bartow had an impressive overall record, not only taking UCLA to the Final Four, but also leading Memphis State (now just Memphis) to the 1973 national-title game, where it lost to UCLA. Cunningham showed a lot of promise in his brief coaching stint, but his career interests lie elsewhere. Lavin and Alford were solid, although each enjoyed only modest postseason success (Lavin led one team, UCLA in 1997, to the Elite Eight, whereas no Alford team at any Division I school went beyond the Sweet Sixteen).

For the most part, then, the quality of the post-Wooden UCLA coaches was high. Instead, the real problem seems to be instability on the Bruin sideline, both in terms of the frequent turnover of coaches and the off-the-court problems with which some of them were involved. For whatever reason, coaching stints of 20 years or longer at the same school are quite rare today. Within power conferences, only Jim Boeheim, Mike Krzyzewski, and Tom Izzo fit the bill.

Someone who was never far from the revolving door of post-Wooden UCLA coaching, but who never actually entered it, was former Bruin assistant Denny Crum. Crum, of course, had left UCLA after the 1971 tournament to begin a 30-year head-coaching run at Louisville that yielded two national titles (1980, over UCLA in the final, and 1986) and six Final Four appearances. According to one source, longtime UCLA athletic director J.D. Morgan disliked Crum and opted for Bartow, who more resembled Wooden in background and personality. Crum claimed to have been offered the UCLA job on three other occasions, but always declined it. Whether Crum could have posted similar numbers as a head coach at UCLA as he did at Louisville, we’ll never know. However, the Bruins’ repeated failure to land Crum in the post-Wooden era could only have magnified Bruin fans’ frustration at the dearth of championships.

Recruiting

What about the players UCLA has recruited in the past 43 years? Centers Lew Alcindor (1966-67 to 1968-69; later known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) and Bill Walton (1971-72 to 1973-74) led the Bruins to five out of six possible national titles during their varsity playing careers, in an era of freshman ineligibility. That both of these all-time greats completed their respective senior seasons[2] is noteworthy, however, in terms of maintaining a dynasty. How many more NCAA titles would Michigan State have won, for example, if Magic Johnson hadn’t turned pro after his sophomore year?

UCLA has had some very good post-Wooden players stay four years – such as Ed O’Bannon, who led the Bruins to the 1995 title -- but many haven’t. And no Bruin player has had quite the impact of Alcindor or Walton. How good has UCLA’s on-court talent been over the past 44 years, relative to that of other schools?

The closest current program to the John Wooden-era Bruins, in my view, is Duke. Krzyzewski, with 39 years on the Blue Devils’ bench, gives Duke a similar iconic coaching figure to Wooden. Coach K has won fewer national titles (five) than has Wooden, but has the same number of Final Four appearances (12) as him. Whatever one thinks of this UCLA-Duke comparison, it is safe to say that bringing in Duke’s caliber of players would improve virtually any school’s chances of contending for national championships.

How has UCLA’s talent over the past 43 years compared to Duke’s? Using Sports-Reference.com’s Recruiting Services Consensus Index (RSCI) Rankings (which go back to 1998-99), supplemented by my own personal stack of annual preseason college-basketball magazines[3] (going back to 1989-90), I devised a system to assign an overall yearly recruitment-quality score to UCLA and to Duke. I awarded three points for each Top 10 national recruit a school landed, two points for each recruit ranked 11-25, and one point for each recruit ranked 26-50. As an example, an entering class of two Top 10 players, a player ranked 11-25 and one ranked 26-50 would yield nine points. Results are shown in the three following graphs (which you can click to enlarge).

The upper-left graph shows UCLA’s year-to-year recruiting success, going back as far as I had data. The players who entered in the Bruins’ two best recruiting classes are listed in this graph. As is evident, there is a lot of year-to-year fluctuation in quality of recruiting classes (light-blue curve). These ups-and-downs are not necessarily unexpected, as bringing in a large class of top players one year may leave few, if any, available scholarships the next year. To glean more general or “smoothed” trends, I used loess regression (yellow line for UCLA).

The upper-right graph presents the same kind of curves for Duke. Finally, the bottom graph compares Duke’s and UCLA’s smoothed curves. Although the magnitude of the difference has varied, the Blue Devils have consistently out-recruited the Bruins over the past 30 years. UCLA’s instability in coaching may well have played a large role here.

Does UCLA’s post-Wooden ledger of six Final Four appearances and one national title represent a gross underperformance relative to what could reasonably be expected?

Only six schools have more Final Four appearances than UCLA in the post-Wooden era: North Carolina (14), Duke (13; one under Bill Foster in 1978 plus Krzyzewski’s 12), Kentucky (10), Kansas (9), Michigan State (9), and Louisville (7). Michigan is tied with UCLA at 6.[4] Though not making Final Fours at a Woodenesque level, Bruin teams have not exactly been doing badly over the past 44 years. Given UCLA’s six Final Four appearances post-Wooden, is the school’s one national title lower than would be expected? To address this question, I plotted for each school with at least one Final Four appearance from 1976-2019, its number of Final Four appearances (x-axis) against its number of national titles (y-axis).

Based on the past 44 years, the best-fit line in the above graph gives us the rough estimate that, for every three appearances in the Final Four, a team should win one national title. UCLA has made six appearances, so by this standard, the Bruins should have won two national titles. UCLA is therefore underperforming in this sense, but not egregiously so.

To what extent were Bruin fans judging Alford like UCLA’s immediate post-Wooden coaches?

In retrospect, many Bruin fans will probably find it ridiculous that Gene Bartow, with a 51-10 (.836) record and Final Four appearance at UCLA, felt the need to find a job elsewhere after two years in Westwood. Cunningham, with his 50-8 (.862) record, sincerely seemed to prefer administration over coaching, but with greater fan support at UCLA, he might have stuck around longer.

Fans’ harsh judgment of winning coaches who fail to replicate the success of legendary predecessors is not unique to Bruin hoops. Nebraska fired football coaches Frank Solich (58-19, .753, from 1998-2003) and Bo Pelini (67-27, .713, from 2008-2014), after they could not win national championships like former Cornhusker coaches Bob Devaney and Tom Osborne.

Alford’s winning percentage at UCLA was .663, well below Bartow’s and Cunningham’s. Yet, Alford received five and one-half years to prove himself. Alford had his critics among the fans throughout his Bruin tenure, but few presumably wanted him out after just two years. In that sense, Alford was not treated as harshly as Bartow and Cunningham.

A writer on one website covering UCLA sports argued strenuously that Bruin fans were not unreasonable in their judgment of Alford, but rather they simply felt the program was no longer “relevant” in national college basketball circles and a new coach would be needed to reinstate UCLA to the elite level.

In the post-Wooden era, UCLA has shown short bursts of national power (1995, 2006-2008) and, based on Final Four appearances, has still been one of the top programs in the country over the past 44 years. Perennial national contention as in the Wooden years seems a stretch at this point. Making the bursts of success more frequent and longer, and keeping the droughts shorter, is more plausible, but won’t be easy for new coach Cronin at UCLA.

With all the changes in the game over the past 40+ years – especially expansion of the tournament field and one-and-done players – does it even make sense to speak of college basketball dynasties?

The above analyses and discussion accept the premise that a contemporary college basketball program can succeed, if not at John Wooden’s level, at least at stringing together a few consecutive national championships. In fact, two schools have won back-to-back titles post-Wooden: Duke in 1990-91 and 1991-92, and Florida in 2005-06 and 2006-07. An additional two have won championships in two out of three seasons: Kentucky in 1995-96 and 1997-98 (with an overtime loss in the title game in between) and Villanova in 2015-16 and 2017-18.

So yes, stretches of three (or perhaps more) years of consistent national-championship contention are still achievable. These would probably satisfy most of today’s UCLA fans. However, changes in the game over the past four decades make such stretches highly unlikely, in my view. For most of John Wooden’s days at UCLA, there were around two dozen teams in the NCAA tournament field and only one team per conference could get in. In 1970-71, UCLA’s crosstown rival USC finished 24-2 (both losses to UCLA) and was perhaps the second-best team in the country, but did not get in. With many strong teams being excluded from the NCAA field back then, things were certainly easier for those who made the field.

As the field grew over the years to its current 68 schools, increasingly large numbers of teams from the power conferences were getting in. If teams get hot in March, it didn’t matter what their regular season record was – Exhibit A being the 2010-11 UConn men, who finished 9^th in their conference and still won the national title. In the aforementioned ESPN.com listing of all-time best men's NCAA-championship teams, this UConn squad ranked 59th.

The second major change from Wooden’s time is, of course, the one-and-done phenomenon. Quite simply, with the best players nationally going to the NBA after one season, it is very difficult – if not impossible – for most programs to develop the continuity needed for a dynastic run. Kentucky in 2011-12 and Duke in 2014-15 won national titles with frosh-laden teams, but no team has done so since.. Lonzo Ball led UCLA to a 31-5 record and Sweet Sixteen appearance in 2016-17, but left after that one year.

Conclusion

In the months leading to Cronin's hiring, my impression was that UCLA fans would want an established head coach with a better NCAA postseason track record than Alford’s, someone who can produce a sustained run of national contention like Howland did, but without the team dynamics spiraling out of control. Cronin is an established head coach, but his NCAA postseason record is not better than Alford's. There's obviously no way to know at this point whether Cronin can lead the Bruins to national contention.

Someone with Final Four experience would have been especially coveted, but Cronin lacks this. One reported candidate for the Bruin job, Tennessee's Rick Barnes, took Texas to the Final Four in 2003, but he decided to stick with the Volunteers. In fact, UCLA has only once been able in the post-Wooden era to hire a coach who took a previous school to the Final Four. Gene Bartow. 

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[1] The mini-banner pictured above, which listed all UCLA basketball championships to date, was given out to all fans at a Bruins game in the early 1980s. I was a student there at the time. The 1978 title was in women’s basketball, as denoted by the “W.”

[2] Walton might theoretically have been able to enter the NBA early under the 1971 Spencer Haywood ruling, but he did not.

[3] Mostly from the Sporting News, but also from Athlon, Lindy’s, and Street and Smith’s.

[4] Vacated appearances (e.g., Louisville in 2012 and 2013) are not removed from these totals.