Bumped. GO BRUINS. - N

The performance on the field the past two weeks has left much to be desired, to say the least. Offensively, even the biggest proponent of UCLA or its coaches has to concede we have been abysmal. But I think people are losing perspective. 66 jumped to the rescue when he said we need to relax and keep an eye on where we are and where we are going. He would have saved me a lot of words if not for the fact that I am also a lawyer and therefore find it impossible not to speak.  

The second guessers have come out in full force. Brehaut should start. Play calling is atrocious. Neuheisel and Chow are not cutting it. Austin and Embree don't belong in the game. In a sense, this is progress. Last year and in the final years of Dorrell we expected to lose by 14 or more points to Oregon because we knew we were going to be outcoached and less talented. Now, we expect better on-field results. We expect that an offensive coordinator with the reputation of Chow will magically turn our offense into a juggernaut. After that 3-0 start, we may not have said on this site that we expected to win 9 games, but we certainly thought it possible that the turn around we know must be just around the corner was coming a year early, and oh what a treat!

Thoughts of keeping perspective reminded me of a lengthy post I began last summer about my expectations for 2009 but didn't finish because I wanted to add something to it and never found the time. Yes, it may be too late for expectations on a season that is nearly halfway over, but when I thought back to what I wrote then, it helped to provide perspective on these last two games. So, I've reproduced the essence of that post below and have updated it so as to reflect that weeks have passed and things have happened.

I've often said in arguments here that I don't know the difference between expectations and predictions. That's still the case. As fans, we constantly combine the two, our hearts holding visions of roses in January (which in a way represents our expectations of where we want the program to be in the near future) while our rational minds try to tell us that it's not possible this year (leading to our expectations of a 5-7 or 6-6 type of season). This is a post about our expectations and regaining perspective, so I am going to leave all of that emotional fan stuff behind and get analytical and rational.

Any set of expectations for 2009 needs to take into account where we were in 2008. And today, to gain perspective on where we are as a program, we need to remember and what changed between last year and this year and should assume that we want this year to show us we are on a path toward our near future expectations where we come out smelling like roses. 

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For better or worse, Jrue Holiday is gone to the NBA. When he declared, he had the reputation of a high-school prodigy who couldn't make a smooth transition to the college game. Average to better than average Pac-10 guards had rendered him impotent on the court. What's a guy in that situation to do?

He could have taken responsibility for his poor freshman season. But no, in Jrue's case, he went on the offensive, displaying with his mouth the finishing skills that his body could not produce on the floor during his freshman campaign. He and his handlers spun a story about how he was misused by the coaches, lied to about his role, kept at arm's length by the seniors, blah blah blah, what I like to call the "Holiday Abuse Excuse."  The fans' disappointment over Holiday's freshman season numbers and disappearance in losses and confusion that a player so overmatched could actually generate lottery interest from teh NBA quickly turned into irritation that he would denigrate the four letters that he represented on the court. At the end, he received "good riddance" comments from fans who must realize that, objectively speaking, he would likely have been our best player in 2009-2010 and could have made the difference between a Pac-10 title and a Pac-10 also-ran.


But now that he's gone, let's look at the efficacy of the Holiday Abuse Excuse.

Continue reading this post »

Bumped. GO BRUINS. -N

Many teams lost 1 player to the NBA last year, many lost 2 (Stanford and Memphis come to mind), but as far as I can tell, only UCLA and Kansas lost more than 2. But all 3 of UCLA's NBA rookies have established themselves in the league, which is remarkable. BAsketball Prospectus seemed to be the first to notice how well our Bruins are doing in the transition to professional basketball, and that continued with BP naming Kevin Love and Russell Westbrook to its All-Rookie first team and Luc Richard Mbaha a Moute to the All-Rookie second team. The same article put Love 2nd in the rookie of the year balloting (behind Brook Lopez). I am not sure I agree with that lofty position for Love because of his relative difficulty scoring, but Love certainly was a beast on the glass,

We all knew that Luc was an excellent defender. I used to rewind and replay action from games when he would make a play that made my jaw drop. The dive-steal at the end of the Gonzaga game (which is still on my tivo) and plays against LSU and Oregon (home 2007) where he covered 15 feet in two steps to steal a pass and block a shot, respectively, are in the category of plays I had to see again and again to believe that they actually happened. We saw on this year's Bruins team the difference between having an otherworldly defender at the 4 and an ordinary defender at the 4.

Still, I am surprised that Luc took no time to establish himself as one of the top defensive power forwards in the NBA. Usually, getting noticed for defense takes several years. But Luc is receiving all kinds of recognition for his defense. At Basketball Prospectus, he received honorable mention on the all defensive team at the power forward position. BP noted the enormity of his accomplishment:

Rare is the rookie who can step into the NBA and become an elite defender right away. Mbah a Moute has been just that at both forward positions for the Bucks, helping Scott Skiles turn the Bucks from one of the league's worst defenses into an average one overnight.

John Hollinger of ESPN noticed as well, naming Luc to his 3rd team all-defense at power forward:

It's rare for a rookie to crack this list, much less move into the upper tier of the league's frontcourt defenders, but Mbah a Moute was that good. The 6-9 forward from UCLA guarded 2s, 3s and 4s, and with his quickness, long arms and surprisingly developed knowledge, he proved adept no matter the assignment.

SI.com also ranked Love and Westbrook in their top 5 rookies of the season.

What does this mean? First, congratulations to all three Bruins to their success in the NBA. Second, when the NCAA season started, I don't think anybody fully contemplated at the time just how significant the loss of these 3 players would be to the 2008-09 Bruin team. Despite what Collison, Aboya and Shipp meant to the team, only Collison is an NBA player, and it is doubtful (to me at least) that he will have the kind of impact that any of the 3 2009 NBA rookies.

In 2008, we were all disappointed that we did not win a national championship. Looking at the 3 players from that team who succeeded in the NBA this year, I understand the disappointment. However, that 2008 team lacked an important quality that ultimately led to its downfall: depth. Beyond the 3 who left last year and Collison, the 2008 Bruins had no future pros. With Shipp struggling mightily at the 3 and no backups at the point guard or two wing positions, we really were playing with 4 excellent collegiate players. We had solid backups at the 4 and 5 spots, but Luc and Love were so good that the drop off to the bench in those spots was severe.

Why did we lack depth and can it be remedied? If we go back to 2003, we may have the answer why. Howland arrived in Westwood when UCLA was at an all-time low in recruiting circles. He immediately brought in some guys, but it takes time to build a depth of talent. Many local guys will commit based on faith that success will come (JF, AA, JS, LMR, thank you), others, namely nationally prominent recruits, want to see the success before they sign. The 2005 class (Collison's), which was signed before Howland had a winning season at UCLA, was excellent, but it did not have any recruits that were getting offers from what were then the national powers. The 2006 class, signed before Howland had an NCAA tourney win at UCLA (Keefe, Westbrook and Dragovic) included one player who could have gone elsewhere but signed on faith (Keefe), one foreigner who wasn't highly recruited, and one rising star who signed after the season we went to the NCAA finals.

Love was the first senior to commit to UCLA after it had national recognition, the first to sign with UCLA over a national power (UNC), and he was the recruit who stamped "national player" on UCLA hoops recruiting. We probably arrived too late to the scene to get Harden (whose close friend Glasser was already at ASU), but we had arrived.

Since Love's signing, we have brought in 10 top-100 players (according to scout.com) in 2 years (5 each season). In the 4 years ending with Love's signing, we brought in 10 (out of 14 total recruits), and no more than 3 in any season (AA, JF, LMR, DC, Ryan Wright, Roll, Keefe, RW, KL, Stanback). Prior to Love's signing, we signed fewer players (3.5 per season) and fewer top 100 players (2.5 per season).

It is clear from the above data that being a top-100 recruit is not everything (Luc was not in the top 100, Stanback and Wright were). However, I think it's fair to say that top-100 recruits have better odds than those who are not. Now that UCLA is locked a loaded in recruiting circles, I think it's safe to expect that no one will turn down UCLA because it lacks national cache or fails to produce pros. Academic and fit requirements will be challenging for Howland, but with the national presence, he should continue to find top players willing to come to UCLA.

With the last two classes, UCLA appears poised to counter the lack of depth of the 2008 team, which was only magnified when Farmar and Afflalo, two of the 10 top-100 recruits who would have been eligible on the 2008 team, left early for the NBA and Mike Roll, a 3rd top 100 recruit, was lost for the season due to his plantar tendon injury.

I am not certain whether the frosh-soph talent on next year's team will develop quickly enough for us to win a Pac-10 title next year, but I'm looking forward to watching it unfold and I have a lot of optimism about the next several seasons.

Bumped. GO BRUINS. -N

With UCLA having suffered an early exit from this year's tourney, we UCLA fans are bound to run into a joker or two who will try to denigrate our program as having amounted to nothing since the retirement of John R. Wooden shortly after UCLA won its 10th national championship in 1975. I heard from one of those jokers today, so I did a little research and learned some fun facts that might help you if you encounter these Bruin-haters.

Before getting into the data, it is important to note that I do not subscribe to a theory that college basketball began in 1975-76 (Year 1 AW (After Wooden)), or in 1985 (Year 1 of the 64- now 65-team field). The previous years are meaningful. Morevoer, no one would suggest that Duke fans should be forced to remove the Coach K years or UNC to remove Dean Smith's tenure or Indiana to remove Bobby Knight's success from any discussion of which program is the greatest.. That being said, if we were to pretend that college basketball began when Coach retired, UCLA holds up very well against other programs and has clearly been, in this 34-year stretch, one of the 5 or 6 elite programs in the country.

Since Wooden retired, UCLA has:

• won 13 conference titles, which ranks 4th behind UNC (17), Kansas (16), Kentucky (14).
• appeared in 27 NCAA tournaments, which ranks tied for 4th (with Arizona, Louisville, Kansas and Kentucky) behind UNC (32), Indiana (28) and Duke (28).
• been to 6 Final 4s, which ranks tied for 4th behind Duke (11), UNC (11) and Kansas (7) have been to more)
• won 1 championship, which ranks tied for 10th behind Kentucky, Indiana, UNC and Duke (3 each), and Louisville, Kansas, Florida, UConn, Michigan State, (2 each)

So, in the last 34 years, we rank 4th nationally in 3 of the 4 categories involving major accomplishments, and we're two national championships away from being at the top of that category. Only UNC has done more in every category. We've even handicapped ourselves (or you could say that Pete Dalis handicapped us) during this period by having 7 years of Hair Gel and 7 more with Farmer and Hazzard at the helm. That's a pretty phenomenal record since Wooden retired, a record that about 340 Division I teams would gladly trade with us. Indeed, if you are as optimistic as I am, you have to believe that the next 10 years will have at least one more and maybe as many as 2 more titles for the Bruins (I say 2 because no team has won more than 2 titles in any 10 year period since Wooden retired), which would move our national ranking even higher.  If you wanted to assign points for these accomplishments based on their significance, I would use something like 1 for a tourney appearance, 2 for a conference championship, 3 for a Final 4 and 5 for a championship (recognizing that a national championship would actually be worth 9 because it is a tourney and Final 4 appearance) UCLA would rank 5th:

• UNC  114
• Duke: 99
• Kansas: 90
• Kentucky: 88
• UCLA: 76
• Indiana: 74

So, next time someone says, what has UCLA done since Wooden retired, you'll be well armed. Of course, in our universe and any other that includes Woden, any argument about greatness in college basketball can be won merely by saying 4 words: UCLA, Wooden. Alcindor, Walton. If you prefer more detail:

• 43 tournament appearances (2nd to Kentucky (50)
• 18 Final Fours (1st)
• 11 championships (1st)
• 99 tournament wins (2nd to Kentucky (100), but could fall behind UNC this year (99))
• 40 Conference Championships
• 1,642 wins
• 10 consecutive Final 4s (most ever)
• 37 First Team All Americans
• 31 First Round NBA Draft Picks

Go Bruins!

Bumped. GO BRUINS. -N

I started this post on Friday afternoon but didn't have time to finish it. In the intervening 50 hours, the point has become more personal for Bruins fans than it was previously. I think this offseason is the right time for the NCAA selection committee to finally eliminate RPI in favor of a formula that considers margin of victory. By ignoring victory margin, the committee is handicapping itself in its quest to identify the 34 best at-large teams.

This year in particular Consider how the incessant "bubble" discussion would change for Pac-10 teams if a measure like Sagarin's Predictor (which uses margin of victory), Sagarin's Rating (which synthesizes his Predictor with a model that does not consider margin of victory) or Ken Pomeroy's Pythagorean formula were used instead of RPI (rankings through last Thursday's games--I compiled this on Friday; it's close enough to how these ended up for you to get the point):

Team    RPI    Sag Prdctr    Sag Rtg        KenPom
UW         11        14 (-3)        17 (-6)          14 (-3)
UCLA    27        7 (+20)        14 (+13)        6 (+21)
ASU       30       12 (+18)        21 (+9)        13 (+17)
Cal         40       28 (+12)        27 (+12)        29 (+11)
USC       49       30 (+19)        39 (+10)        33 (+16)
Ariz         58       40 (+18)        44 (+14)        38 (+20)
WSU      90       36 (+54)        52 (+38)        31 (+59)
Stan      104      49 (+55)        64 (+40)        50 (+54)
OSU      156    120 (+36)    114 (+42)    121 (+35)
Oregon  177    142 (+35)    140 (+37)    152 (+25)

AVG     74.2        47.8                 53.2              48.7 
MED:    53.5         33                   41.5             32.0

As you can see, in every case but Washington, the numbers in the other rating systems rate each Pac-10 team significantly higher than the RPI system does. According to RPI, USC's rating was low enough that it was not even on the bubble when we played them. Had Kenpom been used, USC may have already been a lock to make the tournament. Of course, they weren't and we lost to them, a loss that cost us another 6 spots in the final RPI rankings.

Why is it the case that RPI is so different from these other two respected rating systems? Simply put, RPI's ignorance of the score of games creates a lot of incongruities that should lead its users to question its effectiveness for its purpose. Here is a sample scenario, if BYU were to beat UCLA by 1 point in Provo, it would have the exact same effect on UCLA's RPI as BYU beating Mississippi Valley St. by 51 in Provo would have on MVSU's. In fact, move the UCLA-BYU game to Pauley, and the game would have a more negative effect on UCLA's RPI than MVSU's because RPI gives 60% weight to road losses and home wins. I'll say it another way: MVSU loses to BYU by 51 in Provo, and we lose to BYU by 1 at Pauley, and RPI would rate MVSU as better than UCLA.

The committee shows much evidence of its recognition that RPI is not an effective measure of a team's strength. For instance, Arizona got a tourney bid despite a #63 RPI, while San Diego State was left out of the tournament with a #34 RPI. UCLA, one spot higher in RPI, picked up a 6 seed, but the Aztecs are NIT-bound.

Of course, had the system used by the committee viewed margin of victory, UCLA's wins would look more impressive. After all, despite finishing 2nd in the Pac-10, we led the conference in point differential by a significant margin, and we also pummeled all of the crummy competition we scheduled in the preseason. Use these other measures, and UCLA is a protected seed.

Alas, we have the RPI this year, and Coach Howland was unable to game the system as well as some other coaches did:

-Siena RPI #18 despite 7 losses and only 12 games against top 100 (compared to UCLA's 18 games vs top 100)

-Utah RPI #10, despite a worse record than UCLA (by 1 less win), no road wins over an RPI top 100 team, a loss to a #195 RPI team Idaho State, a home loss to Cal, and fewer games and wins over top 100 competition. And by the way, their only wins of note were against Gonzaga when the Zags were reeling, SDSU and BYU.

And that's the system that sends us to Philly to play a tough 1st round game and if we're fortunate enough, Villanova in its secondary home.

Addendum:

I thought of this while noting for myself that before the USC game, we were something like 5-5 against RPI top 50 teams. USC was 49th in RPI. Had we beaten USC, they would have fallen out of the top 50 (despite being the same team they were all along), and our record against the top 50 would have fallen to 3-5, which would have been a black mark in the selection process. It struck me as odd that no matter what happened against USC, our record against the top 50 was doomed to get worse.

Of course, we did lose, and our record against the top 50 did also get worse. And a few minutes ago I reflected on the fact that we dropped RPI 6 positions after a neutral court loss to a team that was in the top 50. In the rating systems that consider scoring margin, we didn't drop nearly as far. The irony thickens.

With the economy being where it is, I've had a lot of time to read about Bruin basketball. Over the past several weeks. I've read many a commentary on other Bruin fan sites and to a lesser extent this one, that have expressed grave disappointment in our top freshman player, Jrue Holiday. I could go to those other sites and express my contempt for a lot of those thoughts, but I frankly don't think they deserve to know any better. My friends on Bruins Nation, however, are always prone to reviewing and appreciating the facts, so I thought I would reconstitute my call to stop bashing Jrue into a post about why it's okay as a Bruin, and possibly even essential, to praise what he's done for us this year. To me, he has become akin to the girlfriend that you take for granted and break up with, only to realize how great she was when you try to find her replacement.

Continue reading this post »

Bumped. GO BRUINS. - N

I have been waking up in a cold sweat every night at the horror that is my memory of the Washington State game. We picked a grand time to puke out a loss against a mediocre team in a trap game. No sooner could we say "We have the most favorable schedule of the 4 teams in a virtual tie for 1st" (a mouthful no doubt) that we dropped into 3rd, tail between our legs.

The image I can't escape is just how easy it was for Washington State to shoot so well. Rarely with a hand in their face, rarely did I think "That's a bad shot." No, it seemed almost like shooting practice. It was so odd that I kept expecting to see CHP on the sideline in a sopping wet dress shirt and $25 tie. It was under his less than watchful eye that we got used to things like this happening:

WASHINGTON STATE senior F Caleb Forrest scored 12 points on 6-of-8 shooting in the win at UCLA. In two games vs. the Bruins this season, Forrest is shooting 14-of-17 (.824) from the field and averaging 15.5 points. For the year, he's averaging 6.4 points per game and shooting 50.4 percent.

I know that two games is a small sample size, but the difference is so striking, so staggering, it's frightening. Caleb Forrest? Are you kidding me? Forrest hit 2 of his 3 career 3-pointers and scored his career high--19--against us in Pullman earlier this season. Otherwise, he's never scored more than 13 in any game. He's only exceeded 11 points 6 times in his 4-year career (twice against us). He's shooting better than 50% against only 2 other Pac-10 teams this year, but just by one made shot (8-15 vs Cal and 4-7 vs Oregon).

So Caleb Forrest owns us. We saw that with our eyes. (In fairness to the 2009 Bruins, Caleb also shot 4-5 against us in Pullman last year.) But he's just one player. Which leads me to Taylor Rochestie, who last week became the 2nd consecutive point guard to win Pac-10 Player of the Week honors in large part by going off against the Bruins and, in particular, Darren Collison (emphasis mine):

Rochestie had a career-day as he led Washington State to an 82-81 upset of No. 20 UCLA on Feb. 21. The Santa Barbara, Calif., native finished with a career-high 33 points, while totaling five rebounds, four assists and two steals in 40 minutes of action. He shot 71.4 percent (5-7) from beyond the arc and was a perfect 10-for-10 from the free throw line. This marked the second 30-plus scoring game of the season for Rochestie, as he became the first Cougar to score 30 or more points in multiple games since Marcus Moore had three 30-plus games in the 2002-03 season. The win Saturday was just second in school history for Washington State at UCLA.

Then I read this (emphasis mine):

With the 82-81 win at UCLA, it was just the fourth time in 181 games over the last six seasons that WSU allowed more than 80 points in regulation, but this marks the first time the Cougars were on the winning end. In the 2002-03 season, the year before the arrival of the Bennetts, the Cougars were 0-12 in games in which their opponent scored 80 or more points in regulation.

So, Washington State beat UCLA in a shootout, Rochestie had a career day, and Forrest owns us. Strange world. When those things come together, it's no wonder that WSU had the highest Offensive Efficiency Rating against us all season (127.1). Not only that, WSU's offensive efficiency was the highest UCLA has suffered since 2004, when Arizona exceeded it twice in CBH's first season.

It got me to thinking, just how porous has our defense been this year? So I looked back at the game-by-game point-per-100 possessions (Defensive Efficiency Rating) data at kenpom.com from the past several years. Eyeballing the data, it appeared to me that an average defense would hold an opponent to about 1 point per possession, which would equal a rating of 100.0. A rating of less than 90 is very good. A rating of more than 100 is below average, beyond 110 is mediocre, in excess of 120 is extremely poor. I removed Howland's first season from the data I reviewed because that team was, well, not really a Howland team. [On further reflection after finishing the rest of the post, I now think that average is probably slightly higher than 100, perhaps 102 or 103, so adjust accordingly.]

The game against Washington State was indeed the worst defensive performance we've had in the 4 2/3 seasons I reviewed. Moreover, 5 of the Bruins' 10 worst defensive performances in these past 5 seasons have come during the month from Jan. 22-Feb. 21, which spans our last 10 games. Put another way, in 160 games from Arron Afflalo's first game in Nolv. 2004 through the Jan. 17 loss to Arizona State, we had 5 games in which our Defensive Efficiency Rating (points per 100 possessions) was in excess of 117.0, an occurrence rate of 3.1%. It took only the next 10 games for us to have 5 more Defensive Efficiency Ratings that exceeded the 117.0 threshold, an occurrence rate of 50%, an increase in occurrence rate of approximately 1600%!.

So the evidence does seem to match our eyes: Over 10 games, we've had 5 woeful defensive efforts. Five of the worst performances in the CBH era, all bundled together in a painful month. We are 1-4 in those games (the sole win was the squeaker in Pullman). In our other 5 games in that stretch, we defended exceptionally well in two of them (USC (81.2) and Stanford (87.8), fairly well in two others (Cal 92.0) and Notre Dame (93.8) and about average (99.8) in our win over Washington.

Not surprisingly, the team does not fare well when its Defensive Efficiency Rating is high. Here is the breakdown over the studied period:

                                 Record-->
Def. Eff. Rating      2005    2006    2007    2008    2009  TOTAL    PCT.
<89.9                       4-0        14-0     16-0     19-0    10-0    63-0       1.000
90.0 -99.9               9-4        11-1     6-1        9-0      6-1      41-7        .854
100.0-109.9           1-3         6-2       6-2        4-2      2-1      19-10      .655
110.0-119.9           4-4         1-4       1-3        2-2      2-3      10-16      .385
120.0+                     0-0         0-0       1-0        1-0      0-2      2-2          .500

Further detail on this shows that when we have held opponents to a Defensive Efficiency Rating of 98.0 or less, we are almost assured of victory, and if we have a higher rating, we are basically a .500 team:

Def. Eff. Rating      2005    2006    2007    2008    2009  TOTAL    PCT.
DER <98.0             12-1      24-0     22-1     25-0     15-1    98-3       .970
DER >98.0             6-10       8-7       8-5       10-4      5-6     37-32     .536

One may look at that and note that the number of games in 2009  in which our DER is greater than 98 is not out of line, as compared to the number in prior years. I think it's too early to address that data because we tend to play more good teams as the season progresses and we reach the conference tourney and NCAA tourney. As such, I'd like to reserve on analyzing that data until we complete the season.

So, we've looked at the data and learned that if we play defense at about 2% better than an average team [Note: 5% better than average if average = 103.0], we are nearly unbeatable. And that leads me to the next point. As mentioned above, in the middle of this woeful defensive stretch (stench?), this same team brought a lot of pain to our opponents when they tried to score. Cal's Coach Montgomery was completely befuddled. He gave up. Floyd had no answer. Harangody went for 5 and 1. From this excellent stretch against capable teams, we know that--despite the lack of RW, LRMAM and others--we are capable of playing well, quite well, on defense. We know that when we bring major defensive effort, we can run teams right out of the building.

So why, if we can, are we not? Coach Howland gave us some of the answers this week. It's about taking it personally when you give up a basket. It's about executing the defensive game plan with quick help and recover, strong, timely double teams, challenging shots. It's about a team comprised of players with character of champions recognizing that defense is all about honor, pride, team and effort and that defense wins (championships). Converting these simple premises into concrete results requires a leader to take the reins and not let his man beat him. It requires a team of players to follow that leader with the best effort they can give.

We saw in those 4 games who the leader of our defense is. It's the same person who was so competitive that he got in Jordan Farmar's face in one of his first practices to show that he would not back down to anybody. It's the guy who pressured Mitch Johnson so much that Mitch must have wanted to crawl back into the womb. The guy who wouldn't give Jerome Randle an open look. The guy who took enough pride in his defense to significantly slow down Isaiah Thomas last Thursday. The same guy who has now allowed two players of lesser talent win consecutive Pac-10 POTW honors by imposing their will on him, lighting him up for career days. I'm not saying it's only DC's fault that our defense has failed to defend in half of the past 10 games. It isn't. Those types of efforts take an entire team meltdown. But DC is who should be mad as hell about what Wise and Rochestie did and not want to take it anymore. DC is at the head of the defense and can make it difficult for the other team to start its offense. Our coach calls DC the leader of the team and has entrusted him with the offense. If DC wants his senior season to be successful (In Coach's meaning of the word), he needs to look in the mirror and say "Enough." He needs to tell his teammates that he's going to bring his A-game on both ends and demand that they do so as well.

Do that, and success will come. Anything less, and DC will be able to start his pre-draft workouts on March 22, if not sooner.

Go Bruins!

I was reading Seth Davis's mailbag today when some familar language appeared in a question:

No doubt UCLA isn't the top-10 team some claimed they were, but you went way overboard this week with your UCLA/Arizona comparison. Here are some things to keep in mind. UCLA dismantled Arizona 83-60 a few weeks ago. Arizona is 2-6 on the road, with the only wins coming against the Oregon schools. UCLA is ahead of Arizona in the Pac-10 standings. In the last three weeks, UCLA has outscored its opponents, including two bubble teams (USC, Notre Dame) and an NCAA tourney lock (Cal) by an average of 12 points, even if you include the two losses this past weekend.
-- Ryan Rosenblatt, Los Angeles

It sounded familiar because I wrote every word beginning with "UCLA dismantled ..." here, but it was surprising because I'm not Ryan Rosenblatt. So, to Ryan, whoever you are, I know that it's easy to cut and paste someone's words and submit them to si.com as if they were your own words, but just because it's easy to do doesn't make it the right thing to do. Next time, I would appreciate it if you would please use your own words to convey useful information such as this to others. Thank you.

Go Bruins!

Bumped. Not the first time this year we have seen anti-Bruin garbage from an SI.com writer. GO BRUINS. -N

In SI today, Seth Davis penned an article bemoaning the Bruins' ranking.

I'm sorry to hate on my fellow voters, but there is no logic -- none -- to have UCLA ranked ahead of Arizona. And not just ahead, but nine spots ahead. Was I hallucinating, or did Arizona just spank UCLA by 12 points last week? Yes, the game was in Tucson, but it's not like Arizona was a fluke; it was the Wildcats' seventh-straight win. It's time for voters and fans to come to a cold realization about UCLA. The Bruins have yet to beat a team that is currently ranked in the top 25. They have a chance to rectify that when they get No. 22 Washington at home on Thursday night, but for the time being, UCLA is overrated.

No logic? Apparently, they don't teach that course at Duke (I took logic from the esteemed Donald Kalish at UCLA, so I know what I am talking about.) Here is some logic:

• UCLA dismantled Arizona 83-60 a few weeks ago.
• Arizona is 2-6 on the road, with the only wins coming against the Oregon schools and bad losses to Stanford and Texas A&M. Only 2 of these 6 losses was by single digits.
• UCLA is ahead of Arizona in the Pac-10 standings, even though Arizona still has to play at ASU and at Washington and has only 2 remaining home games.
• In the last 3 weeks, UCLA has outscored its opponents, including 2 bubble teams (USC, Notre Dame) and an NCAA tourney lock (Cal) by an average of 12 points, even if you include the two losses this past weekend.
• Louisville lost to Notre Dame by 33 points, yet Davis ranks the 5-loss Louisville team (which also has losses to Western Kentucky (neutral court) and UNLV (home court)) 11th, an unknown number of spots ahead of Notre Dame.
• The Bruins are 7th in Pomeroy and 20th in Sagarin,  Arizona is 33rd and 38th.
• The Bruins have not beaten a top-25 team, but they've only had 3 chances, two on the road. Sample size.
• Poll Rankings are a flawed measure to use to determine whether a team is deserving of a ranking. Had UCLA lost to Cal, Cal would be ranked and we'd be 0-4 against ranked teams. Flip side, if we had beaten ASU twice, ASU would have 7 losses and probably would not be ranked (the only ranked team with 7 losses is Syracuse), and if we had beated UW once, UW would have 7 losses and probably would not be ranked.
• Further to the prior point, in 2006, UCLA entered the NCAA tournament with a 1-4 record against ranked teams, the lone win coming against #21 Nevada, and losses to #3 Memphis, #17 Washington (twice) and #23 West Virginia. By Seth's logic, UCLA didn't deserve to be ranked. We all know what happened.
• Arizona has 8 losses on the season, and we only have 6.
• Our Pac-10 scoring margin is +7.8, Arizona's is +1.8.

All of those reasons point toward UCLA being ranked over Arizona. The only two factors that would put Arizona ahead of UCLA are the head-to-head victory (which is offset by our head-to-head victory by a greater margin) and that Arizona's beaten the 18th, 19th and 20th ranked teams at home (and UCLA, who doesn't deserve the ranking, so why would we count them) and is therefore 4-2 against ranked teams (3-1 if UCLA is not ranked).

And that leads to another reason why Arizona doesn't deserve to be ranked ahead of UCLA. The Wildcats have lost to 6 unranked teams. I don't know about you, but the list of reasons for UCLA being ranked ahead of Arizona far outweighs the reasons for Arizona to be ranked.

Put that in your pipe, Seth, and smoke it.

In other news, we'd better win on Thursday, or I'm going to go postal.

I'd been wanting to post my thoughts about this year's version of our Ben Ball Warriors for several weeks, but the timing has never seemed right. I hate to post after a loss because the taste of the loss lingers and makes it difficult to see the multitude of positives. And after a resounding win, it's difficult to see any flaws. When the first half of the conference season ended two weeks ago, I began to write this, but then the non-Bruin aspects of my life interceded and I had no time to finish it.

Those outside influences caused me to miss both games this week, which hasn't happened to me since 2004. I hope that having missed these games allows me to have a more objective perspective, or at least less prone to focus on the bad things that happened in Arizona.

During the first part of the season, I was focusing on replacing what we had lost from last year's team. Aboya couldn't replace Love (obviously), but perhaps Holiday could step right in for Westbrook. If Morgan and Gordon could develop quickly enough to replace Aboya in the starting lineup, if Collison were allowed to play off the ball on offense, if Keefe played every game like he played against the Hilltoppers in the Sweet 16 game, if Shipp played under control and ceded minutes to Malcolm Lee etc., we could be a great team. I even said after the Michigan loss that we have a team of Collison, a bunch of role players and a bunch of unproven freshmen. The key, I thought was the development of the freshmen into better players than our upperclassmen (Collison excluded). I cringed whenever Shipp or Dragovic launched 3 pointers.

This was the wrong way to view this team. It is not last year's team with some changed parts playing the same roles. No, it's entirely different from last year's team. You don't replace Love, Luc, Westbrook or even Mata.

I was also wrong about our freshmen. They may be more talented and better pro prospects than the upperclassmen, but that doesn't mean that they are better today. I also may have underestimated the so-called role players. Yes, they all play a role, but each of them brings at least a few excellent attributes. So in at least some respects, our upperclassmen are elite.

So, Howland has to play with this year's set of guys, and I think that he and the players spent a lot of time figuring out who the team is. At conference midpoint, 21 games into the season and 9 games into the Pac-10, we had an idea of who we are, and it really hasn't changed over the past 4 games and I'd even say that who we are today is probably pretty close to who we will be at the end of the 2008-09 season.

We have seen glimpses of what looks like this outstanding team, but we've also seen a team that has yet to beat a ranked opponent.  With Howland in charge, I expect to see more of the former in the next several weeks, but I won't be surprised if we have some set backs.

From reading about the Arizona games, I gather that focus was a problem. Focus is a funny thing. In 2006, we lost to the team thought of as the Pac-10 favorite, Washington. One week later, we lost our focus and our game against USC and our record fell to 20-6. We gained it after that and kept it and won our next 12.

That was our last 2-game losing streak before this weekend, when our two losses dropped us to 19-6. Does this season hold for us the same magic that happened in 2006? Who knows? That's why we're going to watch the games. But I have to tell you that it could happen. Even after the team came out like gangbusters in the last home stand, I didn't think that we had really gotten the message. The freshmen were too young, and the seniors had played in too many big tournament games to get up for every conference game. I think we didn't have the same urgency/focus on the road, and I would not be surprised if this lost weekend gets the message across in a way that is sustainable.

Even after last weekend, we are in excellent shape to win the conference. After 12 or 13 games, the top 6 teams (UW, UCLA, ASU, Cal, Arizona, USC) have separated themselves from the bottom 4 (Stanford, WSU, OSU, Oregon). To be fair, the 7th through 9th teams have also separated themselves from the 10th team, but that's unimportant for this analysis. The top 6 teams have gone 26-5 (85%) against the bottom 5. That's five of their combined 25 conference losses.

With 6 games to play, we're one loss out of first place, but, we have only 2 games remaining against the other top 6 teams. One of those is UW, coming to our home this week. Beat UW, we're in a virtual tie for 1st, with only 1 game remaining against Cal and the other 4 against the very beatable bottom of the Pac. The current leader, UW has already played the Oregon schools and has 4 remaining against the top 6 and only one against the bottom 4. ASU has to go to UW and has only 2 games remaining against the bottom 4 teams. The bottom line is that we're one game out with a much better schedule the rest of the way, especially after this Thursday's showdown.

It's going to be a fun ride the rest of the way. I look forward to more ups than downs as a team that knows who it is, has been shown that complacency, lack of urgency and lack of focus result in losses, and has room for much further improvement battles for the Pac-10 title.

As usual following our occasional losses, the posters here are pretty much preaching to the choir. We are not a very good team right now, but that, in and of itself, shouldn't be very disconcerting. We were not a very good team at the beginning of the 2005-06 season when we struggled to beat Drexel and a few other below average teams. As in that year, who we are now is not who we could or should or will be at the end of the season. The questions are what we want/need to look like in March and how do we get there?

We have to start with who we are. Last year, we went to a 3rd straight final 4 but after the season lost 3 of our 4 best players, to the NBA. Put another way, we went from having 4 seasoned college players who were future pros (Love played like a seasoned college veteran just about from game 1 but definitely by March) down to just 1. The other returning players (Keefe, Aboya, Drago, Shipp and Roll), as much as I like them, are not going to the NBA. They are not college stars and will never be. They are role players. I don't mean that as a slight. Every team needs role players and our 5 returning role players are solid and good for what they are. We just need to be mindful that they are what they are, and that of the 6 players returning to the team, we have a future NBA guard in Collison (whose speed and quickness are NBA-caliber), and 5 role players.

To the returning core, we have added a college-ready, future-pro combo guard in Jrue Holiday, plus 4 guys oozing with potential but not nearly as ready to contribute consistently at the college level. How can I tell they are not ready? In 15 combined minutes (which of itself shows that Howland thinks they are not ready), they pulled down 2 rebounds and had 2 turnovers and 0 points. 0 minutes down the stretch. At this point in determining who we are on the court, the other 4 freshmen really aren't are not a part of the equation. So the reality is we are two future NBA guards and 5 role players. Nothing special down low to take the load off our two stars. We play hard but our talent level in the current rotation equates to a solid but not spectacular team who is good enough to beat Miami and Michigan but not every night and not by a wide margin.

So, if that is who we are, where are we going? This is a harder question than it seems and it has me concerned. Looking at it as objectively as I can, I do not believe that going with the current rotation will lead us to places we'd like to go. Too many role players, not enough players. Put another way, think about how ordinary and vulnerable we  looked last year when Love was not in the game or when Luc was out with injury. Now take away Luc and Love (and assume Holiday = Westbrook), and how ordinary should we expect the team to look?

The only way for us to improve significantly and become a top 20 team (yeah, we're ranked #4, but who are we kidding? We're not a top 20 team right now) is if one or more of the new guys steps up and becomes better than some of the role players. We have a great chance to give the other freshmen big minutes in the preseason and take a few lumps on the hope that their experience will season them into useful contributors before the end of the season. Their upside is undeniable, but Lee, Gordon and Morgan need to play to get better. (Anderson is another story--playing behind Collison and Holiday, there really isn't any need for him to play much this year.) While it's possible that even by playing more, these 3 fabulous freshmen will not match the contributions of Keefe, Aboya, Drago and Shipp by the end of the season. But if we don't play them, we know who we are, and it's not who we want to be: 2 studs and 5 role players, and not enough to repeat the success of the past three years.

Howland is a smart guy and a great coach. He sees this team's limitations, and he will work hard to minimize the limitations and maximize the strengths. Will he play the other freshmen significant minutes? That remains to be seen, but if the team suffers many more losses like it did last night, he will not be able to deny the limitations of the current rotation and he may start looking and changing it up. I for one, will be pleased to see the freshmen given a longer leash because ultimately, the team will be better for it.

Bumped. GO BRUINS. - N

Ever since that post-Christmas Saturday 8 months ago when I read the ESPN ticker "UCLA hires Rick Neuheisel," I have been anticipating the first game of the Neu era in UCLA football. When the game was changed to Tennessee on Labor Day as the nationally televised climax of the opening weekend of college football, I could hardly contain my excitement. How could that be? We were undermanned and undersized and playing a game we should lose against an SEC power. Why would I be excited to watch what was likely to be a double-digit loss?

When I sat down last night to watch the game, the dread and detachment with which I had watched the slow death (train wreck?) of the misguided KD era was gone. In its place was an ingredient that had been missing since a dreary October day in 2001 when a heartbreaking 38-28 loss to Stanford in 2001 ended national championship dreams and ushered in 6 years of despair. That ingredient is H-O-P-E. The loss to Stanford began a 4-game losing streak  that also coincided with the first 4-game winning streak during Pete Carroll's tenure at Just 'SC. That loss was the start of an 8-9 finish to the Bob Toledo era and begat the regrettable, hopeless tenure of Neuheisel's immediate predecessor. The tables turned on that dreary October day. Just 'SC was the new national power. UCLA became an also-ran, yesterday's news, the team the entire country wondered why couldn't it win?

The hiring of Neuheisel (who was not my first choice) restored our hope. Since the hiring, Neuheisel has constantly intensified my hope that UCLA could be relevant again in college football, mostly by hiring Chow and Walker and sharing the spotlight with them and by stating at every possible moment that UCLA intends to compete with Just 'SC. So even as the injuries accumulated, I felt that all would be okay in the long run. Great coaching, I thought, would give us a few wins, even if the pieces are not there. Hope does that to you. I watched last night not expecting a W but thinking a W was possible, all because Neuheisel had given me hope.

We learned last night that Neuheisel has also given the players hope, as well as an understanding that it's not always the team with the best athletes or the most hype, or the most experience that wins. The team with the more heart and more cohesiveness (and excellent coaching) can overcome the odds and win big games.

I have never really liked the moniker "gutty little Bruins," but that might actually fit what we did last night. Or Tough Bruins. Our hope and Neuheisel's faith in his team were rewarded last night.

It could not have been scripted better than it played out. National TV in front of millions of viewers. Against a traditional power from the "nation's best conference" the SEC. Overcoming injuries and 4 freaking INTs. Playing with heart and passion. It took only one game for Neuheisel to back his strong words with results on the field, and the whole world saw it. So, we may be gutty little Bruins today, but this game spoke so loudly , more than any ad in the local fishwrap or any statement to the press about competing could have done.

I am not saying we are where we need to be as a football team, but we are a tough football team, with a tough football coach. Anyone who doubted whether we could compete with Just 'SC now knows that it's not a question of "if" but "how soon"? It took Neuheisel one game to do what his predecessor could not do in 5 long years: he has restored hope, confidence, and the inevitability of "UCLA Bruins football" and "champions" being uttered in the same sentence. Five-star recruits, fans, local and national media, climb aboard while good seats are still available on this bandwagon. Hope may be eternal, but the ride to the top is going to be faster and more furious than we could have hoped for.

Go Bruins!

As background, I should say that I am suspicious of preseason polls (and polls in general). Just look at the Coaches poll that was released last week and compare it to the final rankings last year, and you'll see why I view them, at best, with a grain of salt. Essentially, the preseason poll is the final poll of last season with slight adjustments based on a program's perceived loss of talent to loss of eligibility (some would say "lost to graduation" but we know that a large percentage of college football players do not graduate by the time they leave school). Thus, 8 of the top 10 teams in the preseason poll were in the top 10 after the last bowl season. The two that dropped out moved down exactly 6 spots. Of the preseason top 25, 22 were ranked at the end of last season, with the 3 new entrants among the last 5 to be ranked (21 South Florida, 23 Wake Forest and 25 Fresno State). Not exactly a sea change. And you can understand that it has something to do with pollsters probably beginning with last year's final poll and adjusting up or down based on perceived talent changes, much like they do each week based on whether a team wins or loses (but less on who they play or the margin of victory).

One preseason poll that I do tolerate is the one at SI. This is for four reasons: (1) It's not really a poll (collective opinion) but the opinion of one guy named Stewart Mandel, (2) Stew throws out his previous rankings every week and starts from scratch, thus reducing his reliance on the final poll from the prior season, (3) starting from scratch each week allows him to quickly correct misperceptions and makes him more likely to take chances, and (4) it ranks all 119 of the teams in the division formerly known as 1-A.

Today, he released his preseason rankings. UCLA came in at #64. (64!!! Oh, how the mighty have fallen.) This places us 7th in the Pac-10 and closer in the rankings to the 10th place team (20 ahead of #84 WSU) than the 5th place team (25 behind #39 Cal). It also places us lower 9 of our 12 opponents (all but Washington, Stanford and WSU) and 25 places or more behind 8 of our 12 opponents (Arizona is only 11 places higher).

That sounds like a recipe for disaster--if you believe the polls and the rankings. Luckily for me, I don't, so I am going to remain optimistic and excited about this season and hope that the team exceeds these pre-season expectations by far.

 

I was responding to a post within today's front page article by Nestor, and I thougth that my statement was getting too long for the comments, so here goes. In response (rebuttal) to Nestor's well written and well argued front page post stating that we should expect a losing season, I have two main thoughts. 

 

First, last year we had a long discussion about expectations vs. predictions. Expectations, from what I gathered last year, are what you would expect of the Bruins assuming that the coach is qualified and that he's been doing a reasonably good job of stocking the team with talent. As students and alumni of the school that has produced more NCAA champions than any other, more Olympians at many Olympics than any other etc., and has clearly been at the very least the 2nd best historical football program in the Pac-10, we should have higher expectations of our teams than Wazzu, Oregon State, Stanford etc. We should never "expect" to win only 3 football games, and we should never be satisfied with that. So I don't buy that our "expectation" should involve 3, 4 or even 5 or 6 wins. We're Bruins, and we expect better than that. When I saw this post, I was reminded of a 100-piece puzzle that I had when I was a kid that had the saying "Blessed are those who expect nothing, for they cannot be disappointed." If I were really to expect 3, 4 or 5 wins, I wouldn't be disappointed. But the fact of the matter is that if we are that bad, this season would be 4 months of hell, and I will be disappointed to no end. I expect more. I expect the team to be successful (by doing the best it is capable of doing, paraphrasing Wooden). And I think it's capable of much more than 4 or 5 wins. So, I stand by my post that we should expect more, even from a first-year coach with only 9 returning starters.

 

As for predictions, they're like ass holes, everyone has one and they all stink. So take the following odiferous emanation called a prediction with a grain of salt. Without the albatross that was CRN's predecessor, UCLA has win more than 5 games. Has to. Why? Despite CRN's predecessor's terrible coaching, UCLA still managed to attract talent. In 4 of the last 5 years, UCLA finished in the top 25 of national recruiting classes. How many other Pac-10 schools can say that? Only USC, which has done so in all 5 years. Tennessee is our only other opponent to do it 4 times. Even Cal and Oregon only made 3 of the last 5 top-25 lists. Even in the one year that we did not have a top 25 class, we brought in quality players--our average star rating was 3.64, good for 9th in the country. Okay, we all know that recruiting services do not always get things right, but there has to be some correlation between rankings and talent level in general. We clearly don't have 70 lumps of coal, and we're clearly more talented than some other teams. UCLA football has talent. It may be inexperienced in various areas, but ask any coach and he'll tell you that the more talented team usually prevails. And UCLA will be more talented than its opponent in more than 1/2 of its games this year.  We will have significantly more talent than Fresno State, Stanford and Washington State. We will have more talent than (but there's less of a talent gap between us and) Washington, OSU, BYU and Arizona. We will have similar talent to Cal, Oregon and Arizona State (too close to call). We will have less talent than USC and Tennessee. All things being equal that should amount to at least 7 wins and a bowl eligible season.

 

But all things are not equal.

 

On the down side of equal (less than equal?), our biggest weaknesses appear to be at O-line and QB, which are critical positions. Those two deficiencies will probably cost us a game or two. We have inexperience. But not as much as you think--those injuries last year allowed a lot of young guys to play.

 

On the positive side, we also have a new coach. And as much as BlueReign pointed out in his very thoughtful post that Steve Kragthorpe is an example of a coach that saw a drop off in his first year, the comparison is not apples to apples. Steve Kragthorpe is exhibit A in the case of coaches who fail due to AD forcing coach to keep prior coach's assistant coaches. Those assistants then undermined him every step of the way. He had no chance. Our new guy, Rick Neuheisel has brought an energy level to the program that will translate onto the field. He picked all of his assistants (and quite well), clearly with the AD opening his check book to make sure he ahd a staff that could win. Some are even calling it the best set of coordinators in college football. And Rick will get more out of his players than the sum of the collective parts. We may not have the o-line or the QB to go all the way, but he is going to get these guys to play their asses off every week. And in doing that, he's going to milk about 8 wins out of them, against some odds and despite a tough schedule. So goes my prediction.

 

My other prediction is that we will not have 44-6, 20-6 or whatever lopsided score by which WSU always seems to beat us. We will compete every game and play like we are capable of playing. No more of this inconsistency from game to game. No more cluelessness. Perhaps that's really my expectation. And perhaps that's just how John Wooden would define success. Go Bruins!

 

Bumped. GO BRUINS.-N

I was very sad on Saturday, once it became fairly certain that we would not make that magical run to reel in the Tigers, and our likely one and only season with Love (unlike the only two centers UCLA has ever had who are better than him) would not produce a championship.

Depending on who returns for us and other teams, our 2008-09 squad could be anything from a presumptive national championship favorite to a team picked to finish roughly 3rd in the Pac-10 (behind ASU and USC). That's a wide range, so it's clearly too early to ponder what lies ahead in the next year. No, this is a time for reflection. And when you reflect on where this program is today, you have to say something like "Thank God for Ben Howland." Or if that's not secular enough: "We are so lucky to have Ben Howland." You would follow that by saying, "If only we had a little more talent." Here's my explanation.

We have gotten to 3-straight final 4s because Ben Howland (1) assembled talent (some raw, some not so raw, some rotting leftovers from CBH's predecessor), (2) developed that talent, (3) increased the toughness of each player (perhaps other than Mike Fey--there is such a thing as a lost cause), (4) got the players to buy in to his system of defense before everything else, (5) came up with game plans that helped them succeed, and (6) let the players make plays to win games.

He did other things too. This is not an exhaustive list. But it gives you an idea of what Howland has added to the program. On top of that, he's a great ambassador for the university, he exudes the passion of a fan, he's detail-oriented (understatement alert), and his mind is like a steel trap.

It's a pretty remarkable achievement, especially considering that his predecessor sucked the life out of the team and its fans, leaving Howland holding a grab bag of a few talented misfits with apparent poor work ethic and an army of guys that shouldn't have been awarded scholies even at schools like Pepperdine. The cupboard was bare. He had one signee for his first year (Ariza), who was a good player but really only at UCLA for an NBA audition. He built this program from the ground up with nothing but hard work and the premise that once-storied UCLA could rise from the ashes to be a national player once again. Even though at the time, Arizona, Stanford and even perhaps USC, Cal, Oregon and Washington had more cache.

Let's take a moment to pause and say "Wow." Wow. Wow. Three Final 4s and a program that is in the top 5 in national recognition, perhaps even top 3, with only Duke and UNC getting more national TV appearances over the past 2 years than the Bruins. Unbelievable.

We beat teams with more talent to get to the final 4: Memphis and Kansas, perhaps even Gonzaga maybe even LSU (though I doubt it) had more talent. We lost in the final 4 to teams with more talent.

Now, the second part of this diary--each Final 4 has revealed that we were not the most talented team in the country. (How can you say that when we have Love etc.?) That's right. We do not have the most talent. And it's really not very close. We have high-quality talent to a point but not to the depth and breadth that Kansas and Memphis and even UNC have talent.

For example, Kansas doesn't have Kevin Love, but it does have Darrell Arthur (a lottery pick) and its 4th post option (Aldrich) was totally dominant for a 7-minute stretch against UNC. You could argue that Kansas has 4 post players that are better than our 2nd best post (Luc). At the very least, Kansas has one guy clearly better than Luc, and 3 guys who are in the same ballpark and very big. Our bigs beyond Love do not have the capacity to take over games like Aldrich did. Other than Love, our only offense from big players are via Keefe's and Luc's "garbage" (slang for putbacks). And Aboya really only brings defense and attitude. I love the 2nd chance points as much as the next guy, but where other teams have 2nd post options Deon Thompson and Alex Stephenson shooting 68% for the tourney, and we have two guys who only make layups and free throws, we have a talent gap.

At guard, DC and Russell are great, but Chalmers and Rush are in the same ballpark, and Collins and Robinson are probably both better than our 3rd guard/wing (Shipp). And our 4th guard/wing (Roll) was injured, like KU's 5th one (Stewart), but Stewart could be considered a better talent than Roll. As with forward, we lack scoring options at 1-3. With Shipp spending the 2nd half of the season in a slump and Luc being unable to effectively play offense from the wing, we again had an entire position on offense (the 3) that was basically unable to score. When Love, Westbrook or Collison went to the bench, that number dropped to 2 options on offense.

Lack of depth really hurt us on the offensive end. No microwave Vinnie Johnson off the bench. We need something like that to be effective for entire games.

When you get to the tournament, match-ups become a big part of the game. Teams like Kansas who have 9 players that are as talented as our 5th guy have a big advantage in that they can employ a variety of lineups to match their opponent (veratility). Their starters can remain fresh. They can score while their starters are on the bench. Or if their #1 point guard is having a bad game, they might have someone on the bech who can pick up the slack. Due to injuries, surprising NBA defections and, most significantly, having virtually no talent and a bad program when he began 5 years ago, we did not have these luxuries this year.

That Howland got the team this far with 3 studs, one very good major-conference NCAA starter (Luc), one average major-conference NCAA starter (Shipp), one big backup with potential (Keefe), and two decent back-ups with limitations to play at this level (Mata and Aboya), and two other scholarship players who are not ready to play at this level is pretty remarkable. Ten scholarship players, only 8 of whom had any usefulness in this tourney, and, ho-hum, we have another final 4.

Now that the program has arrived, Howland needs to parlay this success into 4-player recruiting classes every year (to account for some early defections). That will not be easy at a school with UCLA's admissions requirements, perceived offensive blandness and defense-first philosophy. But it can be done, and you could say that with this next class, it is being done. In my view, once Howland has sufficient depth of talent, nothing will stop him from collecting banners for the hallowed grounds of Pauley Pavilion.

Now that really puts a smile on my face.

In the Roundup, Nestor linked to OC Register's "analysis", which said the coaching matchup was even. Ludicrous obviously. They didn't stop there. Our only "edge" was in the frontcourt, where apparently, we have only one player, some guy named Love. No one else, but this Love kid's apparently good enough to overcome many other deficiencies described below and will allow us to win 74-63.

I'm on blackberry, so if someone could post the link from Nestor's article, I'd appreciate it.

Let's break down the OCR's breakdown:

They give W Ky the edge in backcourt. Who's their all-american? Waiting. Oh, they don't have one. Collison and Westbrook have won (by a significant margin in most cases) every guard battle this year except 2 games when Collison wasn't himself--vs.Texas and at Washington. I don't care if they have more depth or how many points they average. If their starters aren't as good as DC and RW, their backups surely are not. Their point averages came against worse defenders (by far) and in faster-paced games than we play. Throw in Shipp--struggling on offense or not--and we still have won the same backcourt matchups (except maybe the first USC game).

Coaching is even. Wait a minute, is it April 1? Because surely he's just foolin'. This assessment is so offbase that I shouldn't waste time discussing it. Two final 4s, 3 30-win seasons in a row, and all the rest. This is idiocy.  

Bench: edge W Ky. The whole assessment is based on scoring production by their backup guards. Surely, it's not their big backups, of which they basically have one who's not anywhere near the same league as our big backups. I have to admit, their guards do score more than Abdul-Hamid and the other guard backups we have that play only in blow outs. But let's see how well they score against our starting guards and Luc as our backup wing. I'm betting not as well as our guards do vs. them.

One last note about backcourt: they comment that RW and JS are struggling. We know about Josh, but what are RW's alleged struggles based on? I read that he's averaging 14 points per game over the last 14 games, to go along with his killer D. Our local writers, much like the national media, are putting too much emphasis on our last game.

These so-called analysts are a joke. The Hilltoppers are a nice team, but they have no bigs. Love will kill them in halfcourt sets.  Since we have 5 starters with serious handles and above-average passing ability, their press will only serve to enable a major dunkfest. YouTube get ready. As good as their backcourt might be, ours is "best in the country" good. Our bench is overlooked because they aren't asked to score, but they provide plenty of punch. We will be ahead by more than 20 in the last 10 minutes. It's gonna be fun.

After that, we'll have the joy of listening to everyone tell us how lucky we were to avoid UConn. It's madness.

Hey, I know that every reporter is a bit of a hack, but occasionally I see something that really gets under my skin. Today, SC-grad and SI reporter/clown Arash Markazi takes inflammatory sports reporting headlines to a new level in his column titled "Iffy call hands UCLA a third-straight Pac-10 title".

Okay, I know that he wants to sell copy, and I acknowledge that I am sensitive to anyone speaking ill of our Bruins teams. With respect to the foul call, there was contact (it wasn't a phantom call), but it was at best a ticky-tack foul (and I hate ticky-tack calls). But you know what a ticky-tack foul is? That's right, it's a foul. So even though I agree that the call was "iffy", this headline really rubs me the wrong way. As a Trojan writing an article like this, he should put an asterisk to indicate his bias. And his editor should have stopped him. Here are some reasons why:

"Iffy Call Hands UCLA the title" has only one interpretation. A questionable call was made and that call caused UCLA to win the title. I would go as far as to say that the headline implies that this call was not only a contributing cause of UCLA winning the title but that we are supposed to believe that this foul call was the sole and exclusive cause for our winning a 3rd-straight title. That is nonsense for so many reasons that it actually surprises me that an editor let it be printed.

First, the call itself gave UCLA an opportunity to shoot free throws to send the game to overtime. The Bruins weren't automatically awarded two points. Darren Collison earned them by knocking them down (something Brook Lopez failed to do at the other end 20 seconds earlier when he could have given the Cardinal a 3-point lead but missed). There's a saying in free throw shooting that the ball doesn't lie. By that test, the ball going into the hoop twice proved that Collison was fouled.

Second, after the freebies, UCLA had to stop Stanford's last second shot and then win the game in overtime, which it did in convincing fashion.

Third, had the foul not been called, UCLA would have had 2.5 seconds to inbound the ball from the baseline and get off a good shot. As much as teams practice set plays from there and given that Stanford would have been reluctant to challenge a shot and send UCLA to the line, chances were good that UCLA would have had a very good look and high-percentage chance to tie the game even without the foul call. Yet this pro-SC hack writes as if the game would have otherwise ended or the ball would have belonged to Stanford without the call having been made. That is misleading and wrong. If Tyus went end to end in 4.8, I think we would have had plenty of time for Love to seal off Lopez and hit a lay up or to run Collison off of a series of screens for a wide open look.

Fourth, it is fallaciously myopic to focus on one call in a game that contains hundreds of assessments by the officials. What about the missed call on an obvious double dribble that led to a Stanford basket midway through the 2nd half? Or a terrible foul call on Mbah a Moute that negated a strong defensive rebound and kept the ball with Stanford and resulted in a Stanford hoop. Borderline calls are made throughout the game in both directions because officiating is not black and white, it's mostly gray. To focus on one call in the gray area at the end of the game as "handing" a game to a team--much less a championship--is myopic.

Fifth and last, UCLA earned this title by winning 15 games in conference. Had Stanford won, UCLA was still in line for the 3rd straight title by beating 9th place Cal tomorrow and very possibly still would have been outright champs (Pomeroy says USC has a 52% chance of beating the Trees on Saturday and we have a 95% chance of beating Cal). So, how can this one instantaneous call in the midst of 720 minutes (725 with last night's OT) of a Pac-10 schedule be the cause of the championship?

That's a rhetorical question, of course. It cannot be the cause. It might have changed how the championship came about, but we won it by playing mostly very good basketball for 685 minutes (with 40 more on Saturday).

But apparently, they teach a different form of causation over at the University of Second Choice, proving in this case that you don't always get what you pay for. Sadly for Mr. Markazi, being a "Trojan for Life" comes with a chip on the shoulder about their cross-town rivals and without much of an education to speak of.

I emailed Streeter regarding his article today. Not because of any racial overtones but because he, like all Dorrell supporters, cannot get his facts straight. Here was my quibble (as I stated in my email to him):

Streeter said: "Over several seasons, Dorrell has won about six out of 10 games. So did his predecessors. He's doing what football coaches do at UCLA."

This statement is absolutely not true. Here is the winning percentage of UCLA coaches in their first 5 years, since 1948:

Sanders .773 (9 years)
Vermeil .717 (2 years)
Prothro .685 (6 years)
Donahue .665 (20 years)
Rodgers .609 (3 years)
Toledo .605 (7 years)
Dorrell .581 with a win Saturday
Dorrell .565 with a loss Saturday
Barnes .478 (7 years)

For we the fans, it is not about race, it is about Ws. As one hall-of-fame football coach named Bill Parcells so aptly put it: "You are what your record is."

Assuming the inevitable loss tomorrow, out of every 10 games, Dorrell has won 2.08 fewer games than UCLA's gold standard, the late Red Sanders. He is exactly 1 win per 10 games less than Donahue, who was Dorrell's coach and is a Dorrell supporter. In the 38 years before Dorrell, UCLA won at a .655 clip. Again, Dorrell falls short of that by .9 wins out of every 10 games. Finally, if you exclude coaches that have been fired by UCLA (and exclude Dorrell), UCLA's winning percentage since 1948 is .688.

To summarize the data, UCLA fans have seen UCLA win:

• 6.5 of 10 games over a 38 years prior to Dorrell,
  
• 6.9 of 10 games over 60 years (excluding the records of the two coaches that were fired and all interim coaches)  
  
• 6.7 of 10 games in the 20 years under Donahue, the most-recent coach not to be fired and the longest tenured coach in UCLA history
  
• 6.94 of every 10 games under its 4 best coaches (Sanders, Vermeil, Donahue and Prothro)
  
• 5.65 of 10 under Dorrell.
  
• 5.47 per 10 under the two coaches that were fired for poor performance.

Anyway you slice it, he is falling short of his predecessors by at least 1 win in every 10 games. (In a sport where one loss eliminates you from national title consideration and 2 losses end hopes of conference titles, 1 loss per 10 games is an immense gap.) He is not doing what UCLA football coaches do. He is doing what UCLA's football coaches *that have been fired* have done. In fact, he is doing almost 1/2 win per 10 games (not to mention two fewer Pac-10 titles) worse than his immediate predecessor, who was fired for poor performance.

As the saying goes, Dorrell is what his record is. And that record says he belongs with coaches who have been fired. That's why we expect that as of Monday, he will be the 3rd coach to be fired from UCLA since Red Sanders brought the program into national prominence almost 60 years ago. And we Bruins wish him the best in his next endeavor (as we wish all of our fellow Bruins).

I thought it was another way to get the message out. I sent him this letter and copied the editor of the Slimes:

Dear T.J.-

How is it that you've spent the better part of 5 years ridiculing Dorrell for his questionable results and dullness (Coach Dullard anyone?), as well as calling his hiring a mistake, but now say that it's not fair to fire him? This must be another one of your cheeky articles, right? Unfortunately, I am not getting the sarcasm in this article. Maybe it's because UCLA football's fall from grace is no laughing matter for this alum.

We get the point that USC has barely had to use a backup QB. But how relevant is that since USC has 4 QBs on its roster that are regarded as all-american quality? (By the way, that's a red herring to place the blame for USC's loss at #3 Oregon on their starting a backup QB. Oregon is excellent, and able to beat ANYONE this year, and USC kept it close; the teams that UCLA has lost to are mediocre at best, and only one of 4 was closer than 2 TDs.)  Did you consider, however, that part of the reason its QBs haven't gotten hurt is that they remain upright due to good protection and a creative offensive scheme that keeps the defense on its heels? (Contrast Dullard's most boring show on turf.)

Next, let's assess how much UCLA playing its backups is the cause of this disaster. UCLA's starting QB "led" UCLA to a 44-6 loss to a bad Utah team, and our 2nd stringer Cowan (who beat USC last year and is the de facto #1 at this point) played the whole game when we lost 27-7 to lowly WSU. And when Cowan got hurt against Arizona, UCLA trailed 34-14, so his injury was hardly the cause of that loss. Thus, the only loss of the 4 that could remotely be pinned on UCLA having a backup QB is the Notre Dame game. And frankly, that's a "dog-ate-my-homework" excuse. UCLA should beat an otherwise winless team at home with its 3rd string QB. Full stop.

Dorrell should be judged by his accomplishments, or in this case, the lack thereof. The only things Dorrell has proven in 5 years is that his team has less than a 50-50 chance of being ready to play from the opening kickoff (this, I cannot understand--it's football, where every game counts), that his team is capable of being blown out by the weakest of opponents (even at home--Notre Dame 2007, Washington State 2006), and that his offensive scheme and playcalling are as dull as his personality.

There's also his W-L record, which is worse than any post-WWII UCLA coach, his lower-tier bowl record of 1-3 (including Wyoming's fist bowl win since 1966). How about the fact that his losses tend to be of the blowout variety? Going back in time, his last 11 losses are by 7, 20, 14, 38, 17, 17, 22, 3, 10, 47 and 38; contrast to USC which has lost by more than one TD only once in Carroll's 7 year tenure (and not once since 2001). Plus, the at least 7 of Dorrell's last 11 losses were to unranked teams. The product he puts on the field stinks and is boring to watch (except for several games when Maurice Drew was on the team).

One final point: The players deserve better. They work too hard to suffer all these blowout losses to bad teams. They don't deserve to have their progress stalled by a mediocre coaching staff.

Dorrell has earned the criticism and he has earned the mediocre record. It's time for Guerrero to admit the mistake he made 5 years ago (that you recite in the opening part of your article) and hire someone who is not just competent (which is a bar that Dorrell can't even touch) but excellent. He needs to position UCLA to have a football program that matches the school's championship tradition in all sports and returns it to its championship tradition in football. If Mr. Guerrero doesn't do that, his legacy will be sealed and, despite UCLA having achieved championship levels in most other sports since he was named AD, that legacy will not be positive. As for Dorrell? He'll at least have made his millions on the mistake that Mr. Guerrero made and for his time he spent learning on the job that head coaching is not his calling. That would make him the first millionaire apprentice not hired on Mr. Trump's show.

Regards,
Name and Address Withheld

Bumped from the diaries. GO BRUINS. -N

I was watching justSC play the Green Goblins. Shortly after the Goblins went up 24-10 in the 4th, they posted a statistic: The last time Pete Carroll's USC squad lost by more than 7 points was in 2001, his first year, to Notre Dame, 27-16. In fact, that is the only time Chetey Petey has lost by more than 7 points in 6+ years. Of his 14 losses in that time (including today), in 13 they were within a TD of tying (and conceivably therefore had a chance to win). None was by more than 2 TD.

Dorrell? Of the 11 losses since the end of 2004 (recall that his record at that time was a lovely 12-13), 10 have been by more than 1 TD. 10 of 11!! As with USC, a loss at Notre Dame was the exception. Every other loss has been by at least 10 points.

On top of that, we now have lost to 7 teams that were unranked both at the time we played them and at the end of the year in the past 3 years, and the margin of those defeats? 20,14,38,17,22,10 and 38. Folks, we're not just getting upset, falling short in the end against scrappy teams that edge us out. That's 7 losses to pathetic teams by a minimum of 10 and an average of 23 points.

I have been numb to our alleged football program  for several weeks, at least since Utah. I'm waiting to re-engage when we have a real coach and a chance to be successful and competitive, and frankly, a chance not to be a total embarassment of the letters that I wear so proudly (and did today despite my detachment from the program. Letters that evoke memories of champions coached by John Wooden and Al Scates and Red Sanders. Even so, this loss is particularly brutal. Scoring 7 points against a team that Nestor pointed out had given up an average of 42 in going 0-4 in conference before today. Losing by 20 to a team coached by a guy that is on his way out of WSU for being so bad. Keep that in mind--Doba is going to be fired by WSU!! Yet, he owns Dorrell (Dorrell's only win coming in the miraculous comeback in 2005 when WSU was just as bad). You can't lose games to such woeful teams by such absurd margins and expect me to care. Karl Dorrell, you truly suck at what you do. You should not only be fired (you won't quit, why would you quit when you get $1 million for being an incompetent boob) you should also pay reparations for stealing your paycheck from the State of California.

And Dan Guerrero, I'm beginning to question whether I should support Huskering you for not taking care of the parasite that is sucking our program of all life. (See, Dorrell sucks in more ways than one.)

Dorrell has stolen my desire to care about UCLA football. He's made hoops a yearlong obsession for me. He's made me pull for other Pac-10 teams (not USC) to compensate for my disinterest.

Fire him now. End our suffering. Allow us to be proud again. Allow us to care again. And most importantly, show that the letters U-C-L-A mean something. Champions are supposed to be made at UCLA. Yet 80 guys on a football squad are learning how to be below average. HELP!!

The first post from haywood nighttrain made me think about where we are in the stages of grief for the sorry state of our beloved program. Haywood's epiphany (the moment when he realized once and for all that Dorrell would never cut it) came after the ND loss last season. Mine came on the first two offensive "drives" of the 66-19 debacle when Karl the Wimp punted from inside USC territory despite overwhelming evidence that UCLA would need to score on virtually every possession to keep up with SC against our defensive sieve. He has very little knowledge of who his team is, which is a major mistake in management. It's like he's coaching in some fantasy world.

Since then, we've had a ton of moments that have confirmed that what I saw on that ugly day in Dec. 2005 was the truth--Karl is not and never will be an effective head coach. Until he's ousted, we will languish in mediocrity. He coaches not to lose, which is to say, he coaches to lose. He seems so afraid to make a mistake, to be questioned, so he ends up being inert, indecisive, inactive.

I said it above, but I repeat: he doesn't know who his team is. It's like he's pretending to coach the Denver Broncos of 1998 against Duke, pretending that he can run straight at the defense as if he had Terrell Davis and John Elway. Only he doesn't have those guys, much less any talent advantage whatsoever. His recruiting is a hodgepodge of solid but mostly unspectacular players (with very few rising to elite status) and guys who have no business with the Ucla script on their helmets. I didn't need any further confirmation after last season, so clear he had made it last year that not only did he not get it, he never would. We have been enduring a long sleepwalk (a nightmare, no doubt) to the inevitable demise of Mr. Dorrell.

Given that my epiphany (like the one each of you had) that Dorrell would never be what we want him to be, Utah 44, UCLA 6 didn't confirm anything for me other than my suspicion (hope) that this would be Dorrell's final season. And with 44-6, the fat lady has warmed up and is singing in a beautiful soprano voice. It's all over but the actual firing and hiring of a new guy, but those two events are as inevitable as death and taxes (an appropriate analogy, for the Dorrell era has taxed our hearts and it must now be put to death).

So this is what the Dorrell era has brought to our once-proud football program: Peace of mind upon a 44-6 loss. And that says all anyone needs to know about the legacy of Karl Dorrell, soon to be former UCLA head coach aka poseur in chief.

(Note that my peace of mind will not cause me to go off message--we still need to get the word out to the few who don't see the light.)

So, please share with us, when was your epiphany? And what stage of grief are you in today?

Bumped from the diaries. Summer just started yesterday. But the diary section is already on fire. Keep these coming guys. GO BRUINS. -N

By that title, I'm not speaking of what will happen when Dorrell is fired but what has happened whenever Dorrell leads his charges out of the confines of the Rose Bowl. I believe that the two are intertwined: what happens when Dorrell's Bruins hit the road should lead Guerrero to ask Karl to hit the road on his own after this season.

Reading some of the factual and alleged factual posts on Dorrell's record, led me to report something that's been on my mind. I think we can all agree that winning on the road is harder than winning at home. A lot of teams are very good at home, but what separates good teams from mediocre teams is that the good ones compile a reasonably good record away from home. For example, a .500 road team who goes 6-0 at home would finish with a 9-3 record, which I think would be a good record in any year and very nice if it were a typical year. A team that finishes below .500 on the road cannot finish better than 8-4. Teams that finish well above .500 have a chance for 10-2, 11-1 etc.

How good is Dorrell? Well, in terms of winning on the road, it's not good, not good at all, I'm afraid. In his tenure, the Bruins are 20-5 while wearing the home blues in the Rose Bowl, but only 9-16 in all other games.

Some of you will say, "yeah, but we've played some tough teams on the road, and we shouldn't expect to win those games." Okay, fine. Let's breakdown that 9-16 road and neutral record.

In 2006, we went 1-5 on the R/N, despite playing only 2 games against teams that finished better than 7-6 (both losses). Our one road win against a team with a winning record (7-6), but that is the only road win against a winning team in Dorrell's tenure. Merely by beating only the road teams who finished 7-6 or worse, we would have gone 4-2 on the road and finished with a 10-3 record, and Dorrell's job approval rating would be in pretty decent shape. That being said, we weren't close to doing that, as the 3 road losses to middling teams were all by 10 points or more.

In 2005, Dorrell posted his only winning road/neutral record (4-2). Not surprisingly, it was also his top-25 finish. The signature "road" win was the Sun Bowl victory over 7-5 Northwestern. The 3 other road victories included the two amazing comebacks against non-bowl teams WSU and Stanford, and the losses were by a combined 118-33. Ouch!

In 2004, Dorrell got his only signature road win in 4 years--a nice win at Autzen Stadium, as tough a place to play as there is and a win that made the Bruins "bowl eligible" for that embarrassing loss to Wyoming. Lost in the hysteria surrounding our eligibility for a trip to Vegas was that Oregon finished a mediocre 5-6.

In 2003, we were an unforgiveable 1-6 on the road, with the only win coming against pathetic 2-10 Arizona by 3 points and two losses against losing teams.

Further breakdown of 9-16:

Road record

1. against teams with .750 winning pct or better (e.g. teams 9-3 or better): 0-8
   
2. against other winning teams: 2-4
   
3. against losing teams that are within 2 games of .500 (5-7 or better): 3-2
   
4. against losing teams who are 4-7 or 3-8: 2-2
   
5. against teams worse than 3-8: 2-0 (both teams finished in LAST place in the Pac-10 and eked out only 3 wins combined, but our combined margin of victory was 9 points).

*2-12 against teams with winning records (and the "2" came against 7-5 and 7-6 teams)
*0-9 r/n record against teams with more than 7 wins
*No R/N wins against teams who were ranked at the end of the season
*2 road losses to teams that finished in 9th place or worse in the Pac-10.
*A staggering 4 road losses to teams that finished in 8th place or worse in their conference
*A pathetic 1 R/N win against a team that finished in better than a tie for 5th place in its conference
*A mere 4-4 road record against teams that finished 8th or worse in their conference (1-4 if you remove the teams that finished in 10th (last) place, but at least he didn't lose to any 10th place teams!).
*Only 1 Road win against a winning team (7-6 ASU in 2006)

If you remove the "good" teams we played on the road (.750 or better), Dorrell is still just 9-8 R/N against the rest (that's barely .500 against the teams a good team would beat almost every time). If Dorrell's Bruins had won all 16 road games against teams with 7-5 or worse record, his season records would have been 8-5, 7-5, 11-1 and 10-3, and we wouldn't be having these discussions. If he'd merely not lost on the road to teams who finished 8th or worse in conference, his record would be 8-5, 6-6, 11-1 and 8-5, and this conversation would probably still be happening, but it would be much more hopeful.

Of course, that those wins didn't happen cannot be ignored. I believe that Dorrell's failures on the road are indicative of his mediocrity as a head coach. Moreover, this type of mediocrity is not something that I suspect will be cured with what people are referring to as an easier road schedule in 2007. We have to play Utah, WSU, OSU, USC, Stanford and Arizona on the road. I would suspect that 3 of those teams will finish with a winning record and two others (Arizona and OSU) to probably be no worse than 5-7, and only Stanford to be worse than that. Given Dorrell's past record on the road, I can't bring myself to "predict" that Dorrell will do well enough to meet my expectation of a Pac-10 championship at once every 5 years.

Please feel free to add thoughts or to help strengthen this argument by (1) breaking down the 20-5 home record by quality of opponent, and (2) proving or disproving my hypothesis that good teams do well on the road, and even beat some good teams outside the friendly confines of the home stadium.

When the brackets for the NCAA baseball tournament were announced (with so little fanfare that it can't be called May Madness), I was appalled by the continued deference by the baseball selection committee to the ACC, SEC and Big 12. Only ASU received a #1 seed. Arizona went 40-15 and finished 2nd in the Pac-10 but didn't manage to procure a #1 seed. Oregon State, 38-17 and the defending national champs was relegated to a #3 seed. Meanwhile, the SEC picked up 4 of the 16 #1 seeds (including 37-23 Ole Miss), and the ACC and Big 12 each garnered 3 #1 seeds in the Big Rave. Three conferences thus had 10 of the 16 #1 seeds (and corresponding home-field advantage), while the other 6 #1 seeds went to Pac-10 champ ASU and 5 other schools that do not have a major conference affiliation.

After one weekend, it looks like the committee can take its deference to the Blue South and put it where the sun doesn't shine because when it comes to baseball, the Pac-10 is showing up big time.

Of the four Pac-10 teams that made the tourney (with seeds of 1, 2, 2 and 3), THREE made the Super 16 (including UCLA and Oregon State, who combined to go 3-0 in elimination games against the #1 seeded host of their regions).
The 4th, Arizona, took the #1 seed in its region to the brink, with Wichita State winning two elimination games at home, including the first game by scoring a run with 2 outs in the bottom of the 9th, to advance.

The 4 teams went a combined 12-3, with the only losses coming against #1 seeds (3-3 combined vs. the #1s).
The 4 teams went 9-0 against everyone else.

The SEC used its great seeding (4 #1 seeds and 1 #2 seed) and resulting home-field to its advantage, advancing 3 of 5 teams (including #1 Ole Miss, who had a joke of a draw), but two of its #1 seeds (the overall #1 and #7 seeds) fell.

The other two "favored sons" conferences did okay but paled in comparison to the Pac-10: The ACC advanced just 2 of 7 (a #1 and a #2), with 2 #1s and 2 #2 seeds not making the grade. The Big 12 similarly had only 2 of 6 advance, with 2 #1 seeds failing to move on.

The West Coast was also well-represented by the 7 other west coast teams that made the tourney, all from California (UCI, Fresno St, Fullerton, UCR, LBSU, Pepperdine, USD). Two advanced to the Super 16 (UCI, CSF), and 2 finished 2nd in their region (Fresno, LBSU).

This shouldn't come as a big surprise--the West Coast is where traditional powers USC, Arizona State and Cal State Fullerton reside, and more championships come from here than anywhere else in the country. But apparently it will surprise the selection committee, which continues to award the SEC and the ACC (and to a lesser extent the Big 12) with high seeds and great draws to a mixed bag of results. Let's hope that the committee paid attention to these results because with UCLA becoming a big player on the diamond, we could use some home cooking in future tournaments.  

http://www.sportsline.com/collegebasketball/story/10100772

I couldn't resist providing Mr. Freeman with some feedback after I read that article. Here it is:

My feedback is that you are a Grade A ass. If you had ever seen the Bruins play this year, you would not question their toughness. To disparage a team of student athletes who have achieved as much or more than all but 2 of 315 teams in the country merely because it was overmatched and outplayed by a team that is excellent on a historical level--almost certain to become the second repeat champion in over 30 years and who has not seriously been challenged in 11 straight NCAA tournament games--is asinine, ludicrous, insensitive, unfair, and illustrative. By illustrative, I mean that it illustrates that you are a pompous sportswriting hack who likes to convert an article about a game among amateur athletes into a egomaniacal rant about yourself. Even though no one has ever heard of you. Gee, you were right; I wish I could be as insightful as you, who like 90% of the country, picked the overwhelming favorite, #1 overall seed, defending champs and team with 3 NBA lottery picks on its front line. How astute. Can't be too long before MENSA calls. Bravo.

Your statements disparaging UCLA's program are uninformed if not idiotic. UCLA has risen in 4 years and a mere 3 recruiting classes after Steve Lavin destroyed the program to reach back-to-back final 4s. How many other teams have been to two final 4s this DECADE? (Five.)  Much less since rising from the ashes of 2003? (Two.) Much less the last two years? (Also two.) UCLA has gone 9-0 in the tourney in the past 2 years when not playing the Gators. UCLA dominated the Pac-10, which was the only conference to send 2 teams to the Elite 8 this year and had a 3rd team beat the greatest freshman in college hoops history. UCLA destroyed LSU last year in the Final 4. It crushed Kansas by 13, and you want to say that Kansas should somehow be in Atlanta? It lost by 10 to a Florida team that beat tomorrow night's opponent by 26 points. In short, UCLA has shown that it can beat anyone except the Florida team that has been unbeatable in March and April for two years. Disparaging the players, the coach and the university only goes to show, as I mentioned above, that you are an ass.

Everytime we lose, people want to blame the refs. But I think the calls last night were pretty even. Sure, the refs easily could have swallowed their whistles on any of Arron's first 3 fouls and no one would have complained, but AA definitely fouled their player within the letter of the rules all three times. They were unfortunate, but they weren't bad calls.

The fouls I saw called on hedges looked like cases of our players caused the contact by pushing into the Gator players rather than getting position and letting the Gators come into us. Again, they looked legit. They didn't call fouls every time, just when, again, we got out of position and pushed into their players.

The only no-call that I can really fault the refs for was when Noah threw Mata to the ground and got the follow-up dunk early in the 2nd half. That one hurt because the dunk was a back breaker, but even a few bad calls wouldn't have made a difference. And there were a few questionable calls that went in our favor, too.

So, I can honestly say that we did not lose because of the refs. (Except to the extent that we needed the officials to make a lot of bad calls in our favor to have a chance, which they didn't do (nor should they.)

We did lose due to poor execution on offense, due to Arron getting out of position and making silly contact with Gators that led to fouls being called, due to Luc's near total lack of aggression (as last year, he looked scared; check out his 5th foul where he didn't get position to stop Richard and just slapped at the ball like A-Rod against the Sox in 2004 and his move when he blew by Horford only to travel in the lane because he jumpstopped to allow Horford to catch him instead of exploding to the rim), Mata's virtual non-presence, Roll's inability to knock down 3s when we needed him to replace Afflalo's shooting, our inability to pressure the Florida perimeter after the first 12 minutes of the game, our inability to clean the glass in the 2nd half and Collison's failure to assert himself on offense for the first 20 minutes when we really needed him. Among other things.

This was a team loss. We came up against a team that was superior athletically, with far superior size, with better shooters and rebounders, and who play together unselfishly as a team on both ends of the floor. They were better, and they will move on. Howland didn't get outcoached as much as he and the team ran into a team that was good enough to have answers for anything that we could have tried. They were superior to us in virtually every way. That hurts, but it's true.

As much as people credit Donovan for his adjustments and may want to ask what was Howland doing not pushing the right buttons, that's not really fair. It would be sort of like blaming a poker player for losing a hand when the other guy has 2 aces in the hole. Meaning that Howland didn't have the same level of talent to make similar adjustments. What's he going to say? Grow three inches and take it to the rack and so we don't have to double team the post? Start hitting 50% of your 3s? Meanwhile, Donovan just says, hey Brewer's the open guy on the double teams, reverse the ball, and he cans 3 straight (a 31% shooter) to bury us. Is that coaching genious? Methinks Howland could have made that adjustment if he had a 6'9" guy who can shoot the lights out and two huge low posts.

There is a silver lining to being Florida's whipping boys again. First, they are an outstanding team, historically speaking, so we shouldn't hang our heads that we lost to them. All but three teams in the country would gladly have traded places with us for the opportunity to take the same beating.

Second, they will lose a lot of their players and perhaps their coach and won't recover anytime soon.

Third, we will be better next year, even if we lose Afflalo because Shipp finally looks fully recovered and explosive to the hoop and effective on D (if only Luc and others could have followed his lead on how to aggressively attack the Gators interior), Westbrook will get more time and give us more athleticism than Afflalo did, and Love will upgrade our frontline about as much as Oden did for Ohio State this year (and imagine Westbrook, Shipp and Collison speedily finishing dunks off of Love's beautiful outlets). And the whole team will have a whole year to improve again. We will likely be ranked in the top 3 in preseason polls (with Kansas and UNC, assuming Oden, Hibbert and the Florida guys leave early). You know what, that looks like a hell of a silver lining. Like one that could easily result in a 12th banner being hung at Pauley.

So let's tip our hat to the Gators. They got theirs through their superior play. We'll get ours soon. And it will be worth the wait.

It worked out perfectly. From the moment we they punked us last year and showed themselves to be classless, gyrating, chest-beating thugs, I have wanted only to get to the Final 4 and punk them back. Although I would have taken a Bruin championship anyway possible, something would have been missing had we not beaten Florida on the way there. We needed to cross paths with Florida for this to feel right. We needed Florida because only by beating them will the sour-acid taste of the first Monday of April 2006 leave our mouths and free us to fully enjoy the nectar that is BenBall without dwelling on that bitter memory. We needed to beat Florida or all the haters would have said we caught a break by having to play [fill in the blank] instead.

They punked us last year. Plain and simple. But we weren't really us in that game. We looked nervous, and we never really settled in. Our patented, ballhawking defense was a step slow. Our offense took some time to adjust to the lengthier Gators. Perhaps it was because we had just played our best game two days earlier and couldn't get up to that level again, not so quickly, while they only had to beat nice little George Mason two days earlier and were hardly worse for the wear. Perhaps Florida had just too much talent, size and teamwork for us to beat them on that night, even if we had played well, but we'll never know because we didn't.

This year, it's different. Our kids and our coach had at least 6 months before fall practice began to stew over our last that Black Monday in April. Imagine Howland and Afflalo---how many times have they replayed that night in their head and vowed to themselves never to let that happen again. They probably prayed to the basketball gods for a chance to find sweet redemption. They've probably obsessed with how they will slow down Florida and find a way to score inside and outside against the defending champs. The entire team has played this year like they have one mission: to go further in the tourney than they did last year, including a repayment in kind to the one team they owed at the end of last year. And when these BenBall Warriors are on a mission, they fulfill it (killing it at Maui, winning Pac-10 title at WSU (an 8th straight Pac-10 win), getting to stay in California for the first two rounds of the tourney, and the one-game-at-a-time approach to the last 4 games, where they've seized the lead and never trailed in the second half).

With a week to prepare and rest (and nearly a year to prepare before that), I have no doubt that the real BenBall Warriors will show up on Saturday--with a large chip on their collectively large shoulders, and with the motivation to succeed that can only come from coming so close to hanging a banner and cementing a legacy, only to fall short in the final battle. There is no greater motivation, and if there is a group of young men who will be able to channel their motivation into a blinding-hot intensity and stone-cold effectiveness, it is our beloved Bruins.

Statistics show this to be a decidedly even Final 4, perhaps the most evenly matched Final 4 in history. We have an edge on all 3 other teams defensively, but they all have an edge in offense and interior size. Kenpom shows Florida with a 54% chance of beating us (and that's the more uneven of the two semifinals) and a 28% chance of winning the title, and no one has less than a 22% chance to stand on the podium Monday night. It's tight. And in tight games, clutch performers prevail. Guys like Arron Afflalo, Darren Collison, Josh Shipp and Luc. Alfred Aboya, Mike Roll. Russell Westbrook. Lorenzo. Those types of guys. We have them in spades. (Arron and DC's clutch 3s, Josh's FT shooting, Luc's and Zo's clutch defensive steals and blocks etc.)

So, we have the team with extra motivation, the best defense, the best preparation, and the clutchiest (thanks Stephen Colbert) players. We know that nobody punks the BenBall Warriors twice. Everything has aligned like a Hollywood script for the 2006-07 Bruins to bring back banner #12 and championship #100. And to erase the year-long sour-acid taste in our mouths. Go Bruins!

Bumped from the diaries. Slightly reformatted to put in links. Simply outstanding analysis by BruinsRule. GO BRUINS. - N

I'm having a deja vu. The mainstream media is back at it, disparaging our offense and not mentioning how stifling our defense is. When we play with defensive energy from the opening tip, we have the toughest defense in the country to score against. We make every possession a battle.

It's not just Stewart Mandel and his line that it's time to panic. Luke Winn wrote this about our tough, upcoming opponent:

"The Panthers' Sweet Sixteen matchup with UCLA will be billed as the Dixon-Howland duel, as they'll be facing their former head coach for the first time since he bolted for Westwood. It's an intriguing storyline, but I'm more interested in two less feature-worthy developments: 1) the Bruins looked mighty vulnerable against Indiana on Saturday and 2) this Pitt team is playing with far more confidence than the one that bowed out early in the 2006 tournament." I repeat his words: "The Bruins looked mighty vulnerable." On a day when 3 of 8 games went to overtime, another 3 were decided in the final minute, and in the last 2, the favored team trailed during at least at some point during the last 10 minutes, Winn picks out the Bruins as being vulnerable. The same Bruins who were the only one of the 8 winning teams that NEVER TRAILED in the second half. The same Bruins whose opponent never had the ball with the score tied and who only had possession in the entire second half with less than a 3-point deficit--a possession in which our pressure caused a turnover on the inbounds pass. The same Bruins who took possession of the ball only 4 times in the second half with a 3-point lead or less and scored all 4 times.

We were playing a 7-seed whose efficiency rating was more that of a 4 seed prior to our game. Since Winn cites Ken Pomeroy so much that he probably gets a royalty, I am surprised that he didn't mention efficiency here. Indiana made a run, as good teams do. But even though they made some big shots (four straight 3s) and got some breaks to stay in the game (namely a couple of no-calls on DJ White fouls), UCLA was resilient and took care of business. It bears repeating: We scored every time they got within striking distance.

So now that we've established just how vulnerable we were, let's look at Pitt. Playing an 11 seed ranked 66th! at KenPom whose defense is 131st!, Pitt turned a 19-point lead into a 2-point deficit, got a gift of a foul call with two seconds left and the game tied, only to miss both free throws and send the game into overtime. In OT, Pitt again jumped ahead, twice leading by 7 points, only to allow points on 3 straight possessions (missing two free throws along the way) that cut the lead to 1. After extending the lead to 3 by actually hitting 2 charity shots, VCU had a relatively uncontested 3 pointer that would have tied the game and sent it into a 2nd overtime

From that shaky finish against a team far inferior to Indiana, Winn reaches the obvious conclusion through what must be bizarro world deductive reasoning that Pitt is playing with "far more confidence" this year.

One could instead look at our game against IU as a lesson in what happens if we let up just enough to allow a team back in the game (more on that below) and as proof that we have the composure and the stones to ice the game with big plays down the stretch that Afflalo, Mbah a Moute, Collison and others have been making routinely for the last season and a half.

We shouldn't have needed to show our clutchness on Saturday, but we have it in spades, and on both sides of the court.

I posted in reply to the "Panic" diary (a reference to Mandel) about just how devastatingly good our defense was in these two games. Now, I've taken down the immortal Luke Winn for calling us vulnerable when the reality is that everyone is vulnerable and we are less so than most other teams, including our next opponent. But the title of this diary includes "Concerns," so what are those?

Bench. I said it before and here goes again: Howland's failure to use the bench is an achilles heel for this team's title hopes. Playing only the 5 starters (plus Aboya in the rare event that he's not in foul trouble) hurts us in two ways and potentially a third way:

(1) he's not taking advantage of some of the positive things our bench gives us, namely Westbrook's ability to slash to the hoop and ignite the team's offensive aggressiveness, and Roll's ability to make momentum changing 3 pointers (not to mention his other positive attributes). We lack versatility, and our opponents now know that chasing Afflalo through screens like crazy will cause him to shoot poorly, and we really don't have an option B when that happens (unless Arron taking it to the hole at the end of the game was a new-found consistent response to this dilemma). In a game where Afflalo and Shipp are both off, that seems like the perfect opportunity to give Westbrook and Roll a couple of minutes to change things. It would have made Indiana change their defensive game plan briefly, perhaps rendering it less effective when Afflalo and Shipp returned.

(2) he's wearing down our starters to the point where they are going to tire down the stretch. I tivo'd the game and re-watching it confirmed what I had thought when I saw the last 6 minutes or so unfold: our defense was slower to switch and recover. We looked fatigued, and those slightly slower rotations were all IU needed to turn woeful 3-point shooting into a blazing stretch of prowess. Give Afflalo, Collison and Shipp a couple more minutes on the bench in the middle of the 2nd half, and our D may last for 40 minutes.

(3)  One more thing about the bench. Thursday's game is going to be a slugfest. We need to use our bench or we risk being tired on Saturday if we win. While I agree that you must go all out to win the current game or the next one doesn't matter, if we have a lead on Thursday, I'd like to see us use the bench a little more than we did on Saturday so that the tank doesn't go to "E" about 10 minutes into that game (should we be fortunate enough to make it there).

So our bench, or more specifically, its failure to be deployed effectively, are a big concern for the remainder of this tournament.

Inside Offense.  We all know that our low-post offense leaves much to be desired. That being said, Mata has hit some big shots down there, including one in the 2nd half that stopped the bleeding of Indiana's first mini-run. We are limited at the low post, no question. But we do have the ability to get inside offense in the form of putbacks. Aboya, Mbah a Moute and even Shipp are excellent offensive rebounders. If they can turn more of those into lay-ins instead of lay-outs, our offensive prowess will increase dramatically and we will have a very good chance to continue playing beyond Thursday and this weekend.

Taking the Air Out of the Ball Too Early.  Perhaps our coach likes to live on the edge, but it seems we take our foot off the gas too early and with the game too close. Against Indiana, we started the slow down at the 5:11 mark and with a 12-point lead. I haven't gone back to document this, but I do recall some other games that got closer in the end than they should have been because of this strategy. The 2007 Bruins are not as good at scoring with the shot clock winding down as they were last year. I think it's the result of two things (but it's just my opinion): (1) Farmar was very gifted at initiating the offense and getting his own shot or creating a shot for others very quickly, and he and Hollins were much more effective and quick with the high pick and roll than Collison and Mata/Luc are this year (how many times has Collison found the rolling post for an easy basket out of that set?), and (2) Hollins was a much more effective low post scorer than anyone we currently have. Given that we are not as good at quickly scoring in the latter moments of the shot clock, we cannot afford to wait as long to initiate the offense on any given possession, and we cannot employ this strategy as early in the game as we did last year. We need to adjust or this will come back to bite us.

Beyond those concerns, we have the same concerns as everyone else: what happens if we shoot poorly and our opponent is out of its mind? What happens if we run into a team that is just better than we are? We, like anyone else in the tourney, can lose at any point in the remainder of the tourney. Unlike a few of the 16 remaining teams, however, we have a legitimate shot to win 4 in a row, one game at a time.  

Go Bruins!!

For those of you who have a general interest in the tourney, I'll share some of my thoughts and quickly assess UCLA's situation.

(1) Thoughts on Ohio State. Ohio State may have been seeded 3rd overall, but they seem to have been treated as #1 overall on the s-curve, getting the most questionable #2 (Memphis) and #4 (Virginia) seeds and arguably the best 5 (Tenn) and 3 (A&M).

(2) Geography. Once again it is not the committee's strong suit with Florida going midwest and OSU going south. The teams in the bottom of the bracket seem to have benefited by being close to home in the regionals--UCLA, Georgetown, A&M and Wisconsin all have the location edge over the 1 seeds in their region in the potential Elite 8 matchup. Wisconsin is particularly confusing as the 7th or 8th overall but getting to relatively stay close to home while Ohio State is shipped to Texas to face A&M. Exchange the south and midwest brackets and at least Florida and Ohio State don't have that problem. I'm not too keyed up on this. It's probably good for the tournament (more competitive games) to have some home-based edge for the 2s and 3s. But it was perplexing, especially when they announced the #1s and said "#1 overall in the Midwest" and everyone was thinking okay, it's Ohio State.

(3) Marquee bracket. No doubt, it's the West. Look at the potential matchups among storied programs:

UCLA and Indiana, Kansas and Kentucky, UCLA/Indiana and Duke, and UCLA/Duke/Indiana and Kansas/Kentucky. Other big stories would be S. Illinois vs. Illinois and Pitt-UCLA (coaches vs. former team) in the 2nd and 3rd round, respectively. And a rematch of the most thrilling game in 2006--UCLA-Gonzaga, one round earlier. Oh, the drama!

(4) Matchups I'd love to see as a college hoops fan (other than UCLA vs. anybody from the East or South region, of course):

2nd round:
Notre Dame-Oregon ("a real ballburner" -J. Harrick)
Villanova-Kansas (this year's scariest 2nd round matchup for a 1)
Tennessee-Virginia (Guard play here is "Wow")

3rd round:
Georgia Tech-Oregon (bruising run and gun)
UNC-Texas (125-122 in 3 OTs?)
Tennessee-Ohio State (UT played them tough earlier this year)
UCLA-Duke (it's about the uniforms and the history)
Louisville-Memphis (former conference rivals)

4th round
UCLA-Kansas. This could have been a finals game and it's in the round of 8.
UNC-Georgetown. Same deal.

5th round
Florida vs. UCLA or Kansas. A rematch of last year's final or of one of this year's best games. Either way, the viewer is the big winner.

(5) Avoid the upsets, please. With all the parity at the top this year, I kind of hope that there aren't many upsets in the Sweet 16 round. I'd love to see the top 6 seeds all make it (or Texas instead of UNC), plus Oregon and A&M. That would be an incredible weekend of hoops. Of course, I'd give up that weekend for a UCLA championship.

(6) Pac-10 thoughts.

Oregon is back to being a very difficult matchup for anyone--5 guys who can handle the ball, pass and shoot from anywhere. They could disrupt a team like Florida by getting the bigs away from the hoop. Then again, I hate getting behind teams who blow their load in the conference tourney and as a result end up seeded about 3 places higher than they deserved 3 days ago. And how could Malik Hairston guard Noah? Not well, I'm afraid.

UCLA got what I expected as a #2 in the West. And the Kansas matchup is okay. If we win that, we'd have a week to prepare for Florida, which would give us our best chance to beat the Gators (think UCLA-LSU last year and Duke over UNLV in 1991). But how about the Ben Howland "This is your life" bracket? Weber State (alum), Gonzaga (master's degree and student coach), Pitt (head coach and Dixon's mentor).

WSU. I'd like to know what Bilas and Seth Davis were smoking when they picked Oral Roberts over WSU. I think ORU can keep it close, but WSU's physical play and consistency are not the hallmarks of a first-round upset victim.  WSU could lose to anyone after the first round though.

Don't read too much into USC's blowout loss to Oregon (when they were behind 73-36 at one point). Their game the night before ended after 11:00 p.m. (did you notice how every conference championship was won by the team that played the earlier game the night before?), and they clearly had tired legs which caused them to miss everything short, even layuyps.  Too bad they're in the same pod as Texas and have no one who can hang with Durant.

Arizona could lose to Purdue, but I doubt it. I look for them to repeat their performance last year--big 1st round win over Big 10 opponent, followed by scaring a #1 seed by playing lights out for 35 minutes, only to fold like a tent at crunch time.

Stanford is good enough to beat Louisville on an neutral court if Goods is fully returned from his injury. Too bad the game's in Lexington. Even if they beat the Cardinals, the Cardinal are also too inconsistent to last past the 1st weekend.

(7) I think that Final 4 predictions are useless. Any trained monkey could say that 3 1s and a 2 will make the final 4 (and most ESPN guys seem to say this, which proves it's true), but it's only happened once (1993). It's usually the case that at least 1 team a lot of people think will go to the Final 4 loses in the first round (Kansas in 05 and 06, Syracuse in 05, for instance) or the 2nd round (Wake Forest and UConn in 05, UNC in 06). I've tried to correlate upsets with qualities of teams for predictive value but the fact remains that it is random. What if Tyus had missed the shot against Missouri? What if he'd shot the ball and made it against Michigan in 1993? These little things in round 2 determine champions and final 4 teams. Predictions don't.

(8) So, now I get to my predictions (not really). UCLA has a lot of roadblocks on the way to the final 4, perhaps the most of the top 8 teams: Weber State (twice a first-round winner as a 14 seed--95 and 99) and then Indiana or Gonzaga. A revenge game with Gonzaga would be tough (the dawgs love being dogs and aren't afraid of anyone), and Indiana deserves a 5 or 6 seed. Can we switch with Memphis and take the Nevada-Creighton winner? Don't tell me the s-curve results in us playing Inidiana and Nevada playing Memphis.

Pitt would be a challenge especially with Dixon knowing Howland so well, and then the uber-talented Kansas Jayhawks. Let's hope that Self's reputation as a bad game coach continues to prove accurate. To win 4 straight games will be tough. Maybe Villanova or SIU or Va. Commonwealth can help us by upsetting the better teams and clearing our path.

(9) Go Bruins! Bring your A game to each game and play with all the energy, heart, determination and poise that you can muster, and you'll be champions.

Thanks to MIM for posting his insight. The committee has a difficult task in seeding the 1s and 2s this year (other than Ohio State, a clearcut #1 overall, and frankly, given the history of overall #1 seeds, they can have it, best of luck). But heck, this is fun, so here are my thoughts.

If the committee places us anywhere from 2 to 7 overall, I wouldn't have a problem with that. Six teams (Wis, KU, UNC, Fla, Georgetown and UCLA), all very close. Of those 6 teams, we have the best results against 1-50 teams and the worst results against 51-100 teams. All but Wis won or tied for the conference championship. All but UCLA are playing for the conference tourney championship.

The 3 biggest competitors for the 1 seed are KU, UNC and Florida. KU's conference schedule is suspect--only 3 games vs tourney teams so far (assuming KSU is bubble out), having gone 1-2 in those games (win vs. Texas, loss vs. A&M and loss at TTech). But they're hot and look really good.

UNC lost 5 conference games and tied Virginia for the ACC championship. But they look more talented than us and do have some impressive wins on their resume. In fact, their resume looks most like ours, with some trouble against 51-100 late in the year and beating up on 1-50.

Florida snoozed after winning the SEC, like we did in the Pac, but they had 4 games since then to show that it was just a snooze, and we did not. (Even though only 1 of those games was against a tourney-caliber team--have you ever seen a team breeze through the conference tourney without having to play anybody?)

The committee is going to have trouble dismissing any of those 3 teams when arguing for UCLA as a #1. By the same token, the committee will have trouble saying that UCLA, which won the round robin Pac-10 title by 2 full games (3 until the we were rattled in Seattle) and has a 10-1 record against the top 50, is not deserving of a #1.

Georgetown is the elephant in the room that no one's talking about. If they got a #1, I wouldn't argue. Not coincidentally, the 3 teams we are fighting for a #1 plus Georgetown are the 4 teams in the tourney that I fear the most. I'd like to play them after a full week to prepare (national semis) and not sooner.

Wisconsin is darn good, but the committee will have an easy time moving them to the #2 line because they lost the Big 10 by 2 full games, despite a favorable conference schedule, and they don't have a key player for the NCAA tourney. So what's going to happen?

Best case scenario for us is 1 or 2 in San Jose and Wisconsin on the opposite side of the bracket.

Worst case scenario is having Florida in our bracket whether we're a 1 or a 2 and in some region other than San Jose. Even better if we're the 4 or 5 overall seed (because I think Ohio State is not going to last long), like this:

1 OSU     8 Memphis
2 Kansas  7 Georgetown
3 Florida 6 UNC
4 UCLA    5 Wisconin

That is out best shot at a repeat trip to the finals.

What will happen? First and foremost, I believe that the committee will find a place for us in the San Jose region. As much as I'd like Wisconsin in our bracket, I think that is too much to wish for. As to a #1, I think the committee will give us San Jose but drop us to a 2 seed, like this:

1 OSU     8 Memphis
2 Kansas  7 Wisconsin
3 Florida 6 Georgetown
4 UNC     5 UCLA

Still not bad. I'd rather face UNC in San Jose than Florida anywhere. What would I do if I were the final arbiter? I would rank the teams based on accomplishment plus how good they appear. I don't think Kansas has accomplished much, so they drop to a #2.

1 OSU      8 Memphis
2 Florida  7 Wisconsin
3 UCLA     6 Kansas
4 UNC      5 Georgetown

Gee, based on that, I hope the committee messes up and goes with one of the other 2 scenarios.