Hell of a damning piece on Ben Howland and the turmoil at UCLA. No real scandal. No recruiting violations. Nothing really that I would consider outrageous behavior by the players — outside of Reeves Nelson — to suggest an institutional issue. And the defense from former players is underway. Nonetheless, it is a piece that makes Ben Howland look really, really bad. A piece that those UCLA fans who want Howland out are citing as evidence.
The first thing to note from a Pitt perspective, none of this touches Pitt. The issues surrounding UCLA and Howland are only for the last few years. It is pointed out that there were no problems at UCLA in the first several years under Howland. It has only been recently. What it suggests more than anything else is that Howland was too hands-off about what the players were doing, expecting them to all be self-starters who kept things in check. Go figure, not all kids — especially high-major talent — might be less disciplined.
The group he had at first was much like what he had at Pitt.
I mean, read this description:
The core of the Bruins’ Final Four teams came from Howland’s first two recruiting classes: Arron Afflalo, Jordan Farmar, Lorenzo Mata-Real and Josh Shipp, all 2004 recruits; and Alfred Aboya, Darren Collison, Luc Richard Mbah a Moute and Michael Roll from 2005. Not one was considered a surefire NBA player. In Rivals.com’s national rankings of high school prospects, only Farmar made the top 25. Most others failed to crack the top 50 (Collison was No. 100) or were barely ranked at all.
In an era in which coaches spend considerable time managing athletes with inflated egos, Howland assembled a mostly selfless group. The players were also mature beyond their years…
Sound familiar?
And this?
The task of indoctrinating a new player — such as Westbrook, another unranked recruit, who enrolled in 2006 — fell to the veterans. It was a team of prefects, the protectors of the UCLA dynamic, who looked out for each other, making sure that no one got into trouble, that no one threatened what they were trying to accomplish or what UCLA has always been about. They were a tight group. If they went out, to the movies or a party, they were 15 strong.
Where have we seen this before?
I think this piece lays an awful lot at Howland’s feet, while minimizing the contributions he provided. I have a hard time buying that it was all the hard work of the players in creating the group cohesiveness. Especially when the same thing was started by Howland and continues to this point. That can’t be pure coincidence, or simply because his initial Pitt squad like his early UCLA squad contained a lot of low-maintenance, relatively eg0-free guys who only cared about winning. Which again goes to the the credit of the coach who recruited them.
It may be true that Howland hasn’t been attentive to the group of players being cohesive off-the-court in recent years. But I do think he played significant a role in creating the initial environment that veterans passed on the goals and what was expected each year.
I see cautionary warnings in this story. The slant puts a lot of fault on Howland for not being involved with the players. For not caring about the team building. How that snowballed into disparate treatment of players based only on production. Bad practices. Too much partying. No consequences
Obviously, after a disappointing season for Pitt, there will be the questions of whether Coach Dixon is heading down the same path. Especially as the talent has increased. My belief is that Dixon hasn’t let that happen (and after this Howland piece, won’t). Khem Birch excepted, the stories of the team sticking together off-the-court continued through this year.
We’ve seen it in minutes all season that practice still matters, and if you don’t practice well, you don’t play. It’s the delicate balance. You need talent to win. But you also need a team, and team chemistry or it all falls apart.
Odds are, Howland survives for at least another year. The UCLA AD — who has made Steve Pederson look exemplary — can’t afford to fire Howland at this point. Not the same year he had to fire Neuheisel from the football side. Guerrero has now whiffed twice on football coaches and to then have to fire the guy he hired for basketball. That seems a bit too much to survive.
As long as UCLA keeps casting the Wooden shadow, it will always be perceived to be less than the sum of its parts.
Howland made a mistake…he was always going to sit in the shadow of Wooden. Now, he will be forced to resign I suspect at the end of next year.
what a scoop………. college kids party, you can’t recruit bad kids and Reeves Nelson is a thug. i had no idea.
and the characterizations of Howland came off as a complete hatchet job.
SI should be careful; there was less journalism in that piece than I would have expected from them. pretty lame……
But I guess that these days with all its competition, SI has to sell its magazines.
And TX Panther I think you make an excellent point about Coach Dixon.
I wouldn’t necessarily say he needs to reinvent himself, but what i do think he needs to do is take a look at his staff. We have lost several asst coaches to head coaching jobs in the last 5-6 years. Herrion, Skerry, Rice, and Rohrssen (have I left anyone out?) These guys were all invaluable in player development. And I look at guys on the team now like Nas and Dante, and I just dont see the improvement, skill-wise, that I would expect. What does Nas do now that he wasn’t able to do as a freshman? Can he step out and hit a jumper? Can he handle the ball? I think his toughness is great, and any coach would love to have that on his team, but at the end of the day he is the same player he was when he arrived on campus.
Look at the shooting ability/form of Cam Wright. He redshirted last year, and granted he made a three Wednesday night, but his shooting is something that should have been worked on endlessly, knowing he would be counted on this season.
We have Brandon Knight and Jason Richards on staff as a GA. We all know how good Knight was, but Richards was an excellent PG himself at Davidson, and I believe played a minute with the Heat. And yet we have not improved one bit in our ballhandling.
As some have mentioned, we have clearly missed on a few players over the last few years, but I firmly believe the same can be said about some of the asst coaching staff. Hell maybe Howland will be available!! HAHA
Special teams coordinator Phil Galiano is leaving for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers; running backs coach Ben Sirmans is heading to coach the same position for the St. Louis Rams; and graduate assistant Andrew Janocko will become the Buccaneers’ offensive quality control coach.
Sirmans was recently hired from BC.
None of this “reporting” happens and none of the stuff that went on at UCLA is even an issue IF UCLA is competing for PAC 10 titles, going to the tournament and winning games.
SI started digging around because the team wasn’t being successful, alums were pissed, former players were pissed, all were willing to add fuel to the SI hatchet job fire. SI won’t come looking and no one will talk if the program is being successful.
And while I agree that none of the stuff going on at UCLA (or with Howland) is that egregious, it doesn’t take much to bring down a good program. A couple bad kids, a head coach who takes his eye off the ball a little, a bad season, a few RECRUITING MISSES, BAD (selfish) TEAM LEADERSHIP, ASSISTANT COACHES asleep at the wheel, is sometimes all it takes.
Hmm..that hits a little close to home.
I have to wonder how many sources did the ‘journalist’ actually talked to. Seems like three were basicall ytwo ources, and one of them was an immature kid that didn’t like Howland (Nelson). I also have to wonder how many kids he talked to whose quotes he ignored because it didn’t fit the narrative he was trying to tell. Poor journalism but someone who seems more a fan disapointed in UCLA’s woes of late than someone who is actually providing coherent facts.
That said, there seems to be some blame for Howland and it can be a cautionary tale for Dixon — be careful how you treat your stars if your team, unlike say UK, isn’t completely made up of stars/one-and-doners.
I would say the only relevance to Pitt is how much slack Dixon gave Gibbs all year, who in return pouted all season. At least Dixon eventually called him out in the press — something he NEVER does. I think Dixon’s savvy enough to not have the same fate as Howland. Dixon, while not a players pal like the slimy Calipieri (spitting his name out of my mouth), but he’s more a players coach than Howland is. Remember that it was the players (esp Krauser and Paige) lobbying for him to be the head coach when Howland left.
Howland was a rock-solid disciplinarian at Pitt, and that showed in the way his teams played on the court, as well as how they conducted themselves off of the court. He followed an era of the exact opposite at Pitt under Ralph Willard.
Another point that is largely trivialized in this is an examination of the type of kids being recruited to UCLA. While at Pitt, Howland recruited gritty, hard-nosed athletes over basketball players, primarily from the East. In the meantime, Howland’s predecessor, Steve Lavin, recruited highly-talented, largely West-coast guys to UCLA and was having significant discipline problems. Howland comes to UCLA, begins by recruiting hard-nosed, gritty players and does well. Then recruits as Lavin did, highly-talented, primarily West-coast guys, and this is the result. See a correlation here?
reminds us why we’re lucky to have Dixon at Pitt. Honestly, I kinda needed reminding…..
They give Nobel’s and Oscar’s to anyone too.
Howland comes to UCLA, begins by recruiting hard-nosed, gritty players and does well. Then recruits as Lavin did, highly-talented, primarily West-coast guys, and this is the result.
Except the article actually praised the Lavin class Howland inherited, and cited its good work ethic and self-starter attitude as a reason for Howlands’s early succes.
In some of the blowback from the article, Howland has had defenders among his former players, even ones who were in his doghouse.
Ultimately, it shows that he had better recruiters in Jamie and Slice than he’s had at UCLA
Contracts for college coaches are absolutely meaniningless aside from setting pay. Coaches can and do leave whenever they choose, and schools can and do terminate when they see fit. It’s a formality that carries no real weight.
