posted by SCOTT M. REID, OCREGISTER.COM
March 1st, 2012, 6:00 am
At the end of a long afternoon for UCLA in Tempe in late November 2010, I asked UCLA athletic director Dan Guerrero what seemed like an obvious question.
Obvious because 45 minutes earlier UCLA had blown an early lead before losing to Arizona State 55-24 dropping the Bruins to 4-7 on the season and 15-21 under Rick Neuheisel at that point.
Dan Guerrero
Would Neuheisel definitely be back at UCLA in 2011, I asked Guerrero.
Guerrero was incredulous.
“Of course, there’s never been any question of that,” Guerrero said in a hallway outside the Bruin locker-room. “There’s no doubt. Why would you ask that question?”
Nearly 17 months later UCLA chancellor Gene Block should be asking himself a similarly obvious question:
Should Guerrero be back at UCLA in 2012-13?
Lost in the storm over a Sports Illustrated piece on the sad state of the UCLA basketball program Wednesday, a storm fueled in no small part by the university’s inept reaction to it, and the ensuing hysterical debate over Ben Howland’s future a more pressing question is facing the Bruin athletic department.
UCLA players smoked dope, and drank. Howland’s people skills need some work. He favored allegedly talented players. Reeves Nelson is rotten. Take away Nelson’s alleged urinating on a teammate’s clothes and you’ve pretty much described any number of top flight, major football and basketball programs. Do you really think Mike Krzyzewski is warm and fuzzy? I know a national championship winning football coach who couldn’t remember the names of starters when he bumped into them in the hallway or elevator. Pete Carroll “connected” with his players and look where it got USC. And this notion that “this wouldn’t have happened with Coach Wooden!” is either naive or disingenuous. Would John Wooden have allowed Nelson to bully and torment teammates (including his own great grandson)? No. Would he have let Nelson to join the team in Maui after showing up late for a team meeting, getting into a heated verbal confrontation with him and then missing the team flight to Hawaii? No way. Would he have allowed Joshua Smith to eat himself out of a spot in first round of the NBA Draft and the Bruins out of the NCAA tournament? Nope. But UCLA players did drugs, drank, partied and even fought with one another while playing for Wooden. They also received a lot more than free limo rides from Sam Gilbert.
John Wooden
Should Block really let the same man who botched two football hires and stumbled onto Jim Mora only after his first four choice weren’t interested continue to do the hiring and firing at the Morgan Center?
Under Guerrero UCLA has become a gymnastics and volleyball school.
Balance Beam U.
UCLA has won 21 NCAA titles in Guerrero’s nearly 10 years at his alma mater. But the Rose Bowl on autumn Saturdays has become as empty as Neuheisel’s repeated promises to make UCLA nationally relevant. The Bruins have not played in a BCS bowl game during Guerrero’s tenure and have a 41-45 record in conference play.
Guerrero was forced to fire his first two football head coach hires, Karl Dorrell, after five seasons, and Neuheisel, after four.
Rick Neuheisel
At least six Bruin football players have been suspended for failing university drug tests during the past two seasons. That’s even with a UCLA drug policy in which athletes cannot be suspended until a third positive test.
Guerrero indeed brought Neuheisel back for the 2011 season, paving a way for the Bruins to become college football’s first 6-8 team and wasting an opportunity to take advantage of USC’s NCAA sanctions.
Under Guerrero the UCLA football job became so unattractive that even a coach facing the likelihood of the NCAA death penalty (Miami’s Al Golden) wouldn’t take it. You can’t, however, say that there hasn’t been gender equity in Guerrero’s management. He also botched the Nikki Caldwell situation, failing to retain the Bruin women’s basketball coach, a rising star in the sport, when she was approached by LSU last spring. The UCLA women are currently 14-13 this season.
Nikki Caldwell
Guerrero likes to cite the success of the Olympic sports programs whenever he feels heat about football or basketball, falling back on the familiar lines about his “mission” and the “comprehensive” and “well rounded” overall program. But even in the non-revenue sports there are problems.
If you’re looking for an underachieving program, well, the women’s track and field team has been down right Neuheisel-esque. The Bruin women were 34th at last year’s NCAA outdoor championships and didn’t finish in the top half of the Pac-10 at the conference meet the last two years. All of which is hard to do given that the UCLA campus sits in the heart of the deepest female track talent pool on the planet. The Bruin men were 37th at last year’s NCAA outdoors although they have shown some signs of improvement under third-year coach Mike Maynard.
UCLA’s baseball team started the 2011 season ranked No. 1 nationally, had the first and third overall draft picks in the Major League Baseball draft but ended up 35-24 and eliminated in an NCAA regional at Jackie Robinson Stadium.
Guerrero has been often and accurately criticized that in hiring coaches he has been too concerned about winning the press conference and not the big picture. Wednesday he couldn’t even finesse a conference call with the media. Sounding a lot like Neuheisel botching the whole “do you want Norm Chow back?” fiasco, Guerrero, with Block’s help, elevated a one or two day story into a major crisis. A crisis that raises as many questions about Guerrero as it does Howland. Questions like why didn’t Guerrero step in and provide some leadership when Howland continued to enable Nelson’s thuggish behavior?
Reeves Nelson
UCLA provided Nelson with all kinds of counseling but it has been obvious since early in the 2010-11 season to anyone spending any time around the program that he wasn’t so much troubled as he was simply a punk. Howland, blinded by a determination to return to the Final Four, couldn’t or wouldn’t see it. Guerrero should have, and overrode his coach and sent Nelson back to Modesto. (Nelson has denied the accusations in the SI story.) That Guerrero didn’t is one of the reasons he found himself with Block trying to answer reporters’ questions Wednesday afternoon.
That Guerrero himself hasn’t been sent packing as well of course is thanks to Block’s lack of oversight and direction.
Former USC president Steven Sample turned Tailback U. into a world class university. No other Pac-10 CEO had as much positive impact on his university in the last 15 years as Sample did at USC. But Sample was nothing less than negligent in his lack of oversight with Trojan athletic director Mike Garrett and a management style that was equal parts bullying and complete disregard to the rules.
Compared to Block, Sample now appears downright hands on. Block’s stature is reduced even further when measured against UCLA’s last great chancellor Charles E. Young.
Instead of asking what “Wooden Do?” these days, UCLA alums and boosters would be better advised to ask “What would Chuck do?”
Certainly Young wouldn’t appear on a conference call as Block did Wednesday, once again exposing himself as out of touch with the university’s highest profile program, a department that has a $66-million annual budget and involves nearly 800 students.
In finally firing Neuheisel last November and during the coaching search that followed, Guerrero repeatedly talked about the need for culture change within the football program. He then further enabled that same underachieving, dysfunctional culture by lobbying for a spot in the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl, claiming a team then a game under .500 deserved the “bowl experience.” UCLA players displayed their gratitude by walking out on practice, skipping conditioning work-outs and then proclaiming “Genocide in Westwood” when their per diem checks were withheld in retaliation for their absences.
Culture change came up again on Wednesday, and Guerrero was quick to jump on the need for change within the basketball program.
“Yeah, there’s no is no question about that,” he said.
But if UCLA is really serious about changing the culture of the athletic department, instead of focusing on Howland, shouldn’t Block be at least asking himself this question:
Doesn’t change start at the top?
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