Bumped. Happy President's Day everyone. ICYMI - wanted to make sure everyone had seen this amazing post. GO BRUINS. - BN Eds.

Not sure how I stumbled upon these...I think it was from a picture in wikipedia. Regardless, these are from an amazing photo archive at the LA Public Library. Its main search page is here:

Royce Hall on the first day (week?) of classes. The building was ready. The grounds? Not so much.

I ended up searching for pictures of campus and Westwood from prior to 1940. Here are some of my favorites. Frustratingly, I opened a new window to write this so I could easily bounce back and forth from this to the window where I had 20+ tabs open of pictures and descriptions...and their system kicked me out of most of the windows back to the main search screen, so I can't copy their descriptions as I had planned. Anyway, here's at least some of the good stuff I found.

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- Bumped again for those who have noted voted in the poll yet. BN Eds.

-Bumped. We are also adding a little poll after the jump. BN Eds.

In simplest terms, there's been a debate in progress between two mindsets regarding our current basketball coach.

One: Howland did great things, he took us to three Final Fours, recruiting lately has been an issue but that happens everywhere, Howland's still the man who can and will return us to not only relevance, but consistent dominance once more.

The other: Howland did great things leading us to three Final Fours. However, his management of recruiting and management of scholarship players once on the team has been awful, the team has suffered, and he is unlikely to return us to national prominence.

In the postgame thread for the OSU game, a commenter posted this (emphasis mine):

...for many who think like me to be convinced Ben must go, we need much greater evidence that it’s him per se versus his recruiting, which i have definitely found wanting.

I’ve read the comments delineating errors in coaching, so regurgitating those on their own will not be enough. If i can be convinced with other facts about Howland’s coaching that prove his best seasons are irrevocably behind us, not only i would be convinced we need a change but i think many thousands of alumni would. The evidence to change the minds of those of us, alumni or not, who have faith in Howland, hasn’t been presented.

Here's what I present, with apologies for SBN making formatting lists and attempting to indent portions being a pain in the rear, and my not wanting to deal as it approaches midnight here:

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-Bumped. BN Eds.

Keep in mind I was in the band all four years I was at UCLA, and attended any and near-every event we played at, not just the marquee matchups involving our (then-making-)revenue teams. This is my response to a mailing from the UCLA Band Director Gordon Henderson requesting donations.

Dear Mr. Henderson,

I recently received a request for a donation to support the Bruin Marching Band. My experiences in the band were among my most memorable moments at UCLA, from having a blast at the lesser-attended volleyball and women's basketball games, to going crazy in the Coliseum watching Marvin Goodwin's interception to clinch the Rose Bowl berth my senior year, and even to the painfully brief trip I finally got to experience in going to the NCAA tournament that same year.

While I still to this day get chills thinking of marching into the Rose Bowl with 250+ fellow band members, strutting to the drum cadence and getting ready to blow a wall of sound with the 20th Century Fox Fanfare, I note that so many of my memories revolve around sports. Men's basketball won 20+ games each year I was there, and the football team won the first three of its eight year streak against USC.

I look at the athletic program now, and it's a joke. Our women's basketball team was placed on an opponent's court for a NCAA tournament game despite being the higher seed, and our athletic director did nothing. Our football team continues its slide into irrelevancy. Our AD was allowed to hire his third football coach...because the first two worked out so well. Even our men's basketball team is floundering, with this year likely to be the second time in three years that they will not appear in the NCAA tournament. A number of players have left due to never getting minutes, only to play impressively in other programs; some players get 30-35 minutes a game despite persistently showing little skill or effort.

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(another Fox71/KSBruin co-production)

Here are the new cumulative stats to mull over.  The stats from the tenth game aren’t going to have a very big impact on a season’s stats.  There are a lot of pretty dismal looking numbers. Summary/editorial beneath, if you like inflicting pain on yourself.

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(Fox71's words and numbers, my formatting and posting. -KSBruin)

I’m becoming a stat geek.  I was wondering if there was any sure fire correlation between some team stats and top ten in the rankings.  I thought the nice, conservative style - you win with defense.  Alabama and LSU are numbers 1 and 3 in the AP poll, and numbers 2 and 1 in total defense.  But that stat is screwed up by No. 2 Oklahoma State, which is no. 2 in the poll.  Turnovers, pretty much the same.  Red zone offense and defense?  Nope.  (LSU is number 107 in red zone defense, because it’s based on the number of trips into the end zone.  LSU has only had 19 opponent drives into the red zone.  To put that in perspective, we have allowed 41.)

 These searches are boring.  Unless someone has a sure-fire thing they want me to look at, I’m going to leave this task to someone else.  I don’t think there’s any one stat that has a guaranteed correlation with high rankings.

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(All data here were entirely researched by Fox71, and the writing is primarily his, though I've made some edits/tweaks with his permission, and added my own conclusions and editorial at the end. -KSBruin)

Three weeks after the Debacle in the Desert, here are the stats following the Utah game. Someone asked if these are cumulative, and they are.  After ten games, they’re not going to move much, and they pretty accurately reflect the performance of our team. I added all the rankings and divided by the number of rankings, to get what we lawyers call "the average." We average 79th, so we’re just barely out of the bottom third in the country. (Remember, this is out of all 120 D-1 teams.)

I think there are many observations that can be made from these numbers. One that jumps out at me is that our coach’s philosophy does not mesh with performance of the team. CTSS (and yes, moderators, I’m back to CTSS; it’s shorter than Richard Gerald Neuheisel, Jr.) thinks that kicking is winning. Let’s look at that. Our net punting is 34, and that’s good. But to have a chance in the battle for field position, you have to have a defense, and our defensive numbers are not good (although surprisingly higher than the eye test or the stomach test results). Some low-lights and the full table of data after the jump.

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(Please note: though this is posted under my name, all data after these parentheses were entirely researched by Fox71. My computer simply seems to like formatting better than his does, and I'm glad to help.  -KSBruin)

Here’s how we rank in national statistics after the ASU game. Again, no cherry-picking - these are all the stats listed in the website I checked, http://www.ncaa.com/stats/football/fbs.  I leave you to draw your own conclusions.

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This was inspired by LA Bruin's fanshot about Jordan Farmar. Here are 15 more Bruins currently getting paid to play hoops.

Here is my source for info on the men.

Men

TJ Cummings is playing in Japan.

The Bricklayer is living up to his name in Russia. (He's getting paid more than LeBron or Kobe right now...wtf is wrong with this picture??)

Michael Fey has been quite the world traveler; he's now in Hungary, but not with Janou.

Dan Gadzuric gave up on the Nets and signed in China last month.

Through six games this season, James Keefe is currently second on his Japanese team in scoring.

Lorenzo Mata-Real is shooting 68.9% from the floor in Mexico. (Don't ask about free throws!)

Charles O'Bannon is still playing in Japan.

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(Please note: though this is posted under my name, all words and data after these parentheses were entirely written and researched by Fox71. He was having some formatting issues on his computer, so we're hoping that the table you'll find after the jump is reasonably readable.  -KSBruin)

Here’s how we rank in national statistics after the Cal game.  There are some improvements, as you might expect after a nice win.  Again, no cherry-picking - these are all the stats listed in the website I checked, http://www.ncaa.com/stats/football/fbs.  I leave you to draw your own conclusions. 

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The possibility was raised here not long ago (apologies to the original poster for not having the energy to track it down) of creating some sort of exhibition game with the current men's basketball team against Bruins now in the locked-out NBA.

While not exactly the same, Kansas has created a "Legends of the Phog" game in Phog Allen Fieldhouse with many former players involved. Tix are $20 for adults and $10 for students/youth. Proceeds will go to charity...and recruits will be on hand. Think someone in Morgan Center could do this??

A short but sweet fanpost - if you were not among those lucky enough to find your own, here is the quote for today on the one-a-day Coach Wooden calendar. Someone needs to sneak in and put it on the wall in Howland's office, perhaps right at his desk.

I say a coach has the greatest ally in the world if he isn't afraid to use it, and that's the bench.

About a year ago, I compiled the Bruins Nation Lexicon, a compendium of the abbreviations, common slang, and in-jokes we use on BN that would make our site confusing for a newbie. (Haven't read it yet? Go check it out down below the jump before you come back up here. I'll wait.) My goal was not to encompass every term that everyone had ever used, but to include terms that are in more or less common usage. Although I did the work of putting it together and it was posted under my name, it truly was a community project - please see the comments in the original thread.

 In a discussion in the comment thread for Achilles' excellent "Cairo Treatment" post, and a few other places lately, it's come up that not only are some users unfamiliar with the Lexicon (or the terms in it!), but that it hasn't been updated in a while. The comment thread in the original post is now closed, but let's use this to discuss additions and/or revisions to the original. While it is a reflection of what we all use, I reserve the right to exercise a wee bit of editorial control wrt not including lesser-used terms - hey, I'm doing the work here.

(Front pagers: I obviously don't have the ability to replace the original link on the left side of the home page. I'm imagining leaving this open for perhaps a week or two, then creating a fresh 'final draft' to replace the current one. Please let me know if this works in the comments or via email - I know at least Meriones and Nestor have my email address, and I'm fine if you share it with each other.)

Rather than have all of us go back and forth from a new post to the original, I've copied it below the jump. I look forward to the discussion!

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In Ryan's thread about Pauley, Freesia39 noted that around 11am (all times PST), UCLAAthletics tweeted

Be watching www.uclabruins.com late this afternoon for an announcement about the Pauley Pavilion Renovation project. #UCLA

I guess they meant really late, as sometime between 5:15 and 7:00 they finally got around to posting something. Jump to find out about it.

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Bumped. Great research to advance an important discussion. -BN

Prompted by an excellent suggestion from Meriones, I dug into the numbers to compare the reign of Dan Guerrero to that of his predecessor, Pete Dalis. I think it's fair to say many Bruin fans were less than thrilled with Dalis by the end of his 19 years as AD. I was curious to see how they'd stack up. In order to attempt a valid comparison, I will present numbers for a like number of seasons: DG's eight full school years as AD compared to Dalis' final eight school years, and the nine football seasons thus far under DG compared to the last nine football seasons under Dalis. (To refresh your memory, DG began working as AD on July 1, 2002.)

I have for the most part tried to simply present the numbers and let others analyze them. My only sources were the NCAA and the official UCLA Athletics web site. Formatting is always a challenge when creating FanPosts with data; I've done my best to make it presentable.

And away we go...

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Bumped. Amazing research by KSBruin. - BN

Perhaps something to distract you from the recent disasters...

I started wondering about this when refreshing my memory about a past Bruin while posting some wonderful pictures of the Lizard on this thread a few weeks ago. I had also looked into some Bruins in Europe in comments on this thread. I thought I'd try something a little more exhaustive. So, arbitrarily since 1990 as that's when I came to UCLA, I made a list of all Bruins that have come and gone, listed by the last year they were in the program. I (modestly) think my web research skills are pretty strong, but there are some players who are hard/nearly impossible to track down. I've included some of the end-of-the-bench players if they got into more than a handful of games in their career, but did skip a few. Apologies to them if they're offended.

If I've counted correctly, 50 players have left the program since 1996-97. 33 of them are still playing. 37 have left since 2000-01. 28 of them are still playing - 75.7%. Overall, there are 71 players on this list. Keep in mind, this goes back 20 years. 37 of 71 - 52.1% - are still playing somewhere: 4 elsewhere in the NCAA, 14 in the NBA, 18 internationally, and one in the NFL. (Do you know who?)

A note on sources - I've provided as many links as I can. One of the better sources I've found, at least to point me in the right direction, is this year's St. John's media guide. It's a huge pdf, but on page 34 (Adobe)/page 32 (St. John's), there's a 'where are they now?' list of 'student-athletes under Steve Lavin. It doesn't claim he coached them, but it does say (brace yourself) "The 50-year life plan". Barf. It did give me a couple of tips, though. Interestingly, a little over a third of the players listed (17/47) were what I would call scrubs, loosely defined as maybe getting a few minutes here and there but not over 10 or 20 a season.

This page was monumentally useful.

I've never done freelance work before, but I'm proud of the research and writing here. If you're interested in contacting me about potential freelance work, leave a comment below and I'll find a way for us to get in touch.

Enjoy!

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While researching a lengthy project I hope to post soon, I found this quote about the Lizard:

I wish Coach Lav nothing but the best. He's always been so supportive of his former players, and I know he truly cares about anyone that plays for him, both personally and professionally. I can easily say I think his new team will instantly take to his personality and passion for the game. He has had time since he last coached to build his game plan for his style. I love Coach Lav and St. John's is a great fit for him. I am totally on board to support him and I think it's great for college basketball to have him on the sidelines again.

Bonus points for you if you can name who said it...

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