Howland fired by UCLA
LOS ANGELES – After spending 10 years as UCLA's basketball coach – a span that included three consecutive Final Four appearances and the most triumphs of any Bruins coach since John Wooden put the program on the map – Ben Howland was fired Sunday night.
The decision had been widely anticipated since the Bruins went out with a whimper in a 20-point loss to Minnesota in the second round of the NCAA Tournament. But even before the loss, Howland's reputation among the UCLA fan base had unmistakably gone sour, despite him having pulled in the nation's No. 1 recruiting class before the season and followed with a Pac-12 regular season title this season.
The last few seasons had been tumultuous, to say the least, for Howland and the UCLA basketball program, as the Bruins failed to make the NCAA Tournament in two of the last four years. Last season, those struggles came to a head when a Sports Illustrated story illustrated a lack of institutional control from Howland and portrayed his program as one with deteriorating values, highlighted by the bullying of former Bruin Reeves Nelson.
UCLA's fan base showed its discontent with Howland by not coming out to games this season, as the program's attendance numbers continued to fall in the 2012-13 season. In the end, the perfect storm of attendance, reputation, and very little NCAA Tournament success was enough to doom Howland after 10 seasons.
Still, in that decade-long era, Howland had undoubtedly been one of the most successful basketball coaches in school history.
Hired before the 2003-04 season after UCLA parted ways with Steve Lavin, Howland – a Santa Barbara native – came to Westwood from Pittsburgh after leading the Panthers to consecutive Sweet 16's and winning national coach of the year in 2002. After one season of missing the NCAA Tournament and another that ended in a first-round loss, Howland then took his next three Bruins teams to consecutive Final Fours with the help of future NBA players like Kevin Love, Russell Westbrook, and Darren Collison. Still, in all three Final Four tries, Howland's teams fell short of winning UCLA's first national title since 1995.
But since Howland became one of just three active coaches to make it to three consecutive Final Fours – joining Michigan State's Tom Izzo and Duke's Mike Krzyzewski – his teams have been marked by inconsistencies and a failure to live up to the high expectations he had set in those three seasons. In 2009, despite having two future pros in Collison and Jrue Holiday, the Bruins fell in the tournament's second round. From there, Howland's teams finished the next three seasons 56-52, as his seat grew hotter.
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