OT - Louisville/Cronin
- Thread starter BballinsiderfromPitt
- Start date
Yeah, he’s pretty damn good. He def looks like he’ll be moving on after this year.
I said we should have went after him after Dixon. And we would have gotten him. I do hope he lands in Louisville because the league needs better coaches. The ACC needs to be better so we can be better.
You would think ucla would have some cash for NIL. That’s surprising.
Losing to Cal St. Northridge and beating Riverside by 1 point has nothing to do with NIL. He is probably checked out already and his team knows it. That is a bigger problem than NIL.
Final Four, Sweet 16, Sweet 16. I dont get why 1 bad season would have him on the first plane out of there.
He never struck me as a cultural fit for that area.
UCLA is basically in Beverly Hills. I mean I guess that type of swanky area isnt for everyone but the wealthy suburbs of LA are a heck of a nice place to live if you are super rich like he is.
Because he lost transfer guys in the portal because of NIL, according to him.
Everybody loses transfers in the portal due to NI L. Who the F does he think he is?
Some programs should never be outbid for their own players. UCLA is one of them. Syracuse is another. WVU outbidding them for Jesse Edwards was a travesty. And it didnt seem like it was even close.
He’s UCLA. The original bag men. They shouldn’t be losing bidding wars to Utah or some other non descript school
To be clear, I think it was players he didn’t get thru portal action. Not retention.
1 Final 4
2 Sweet 16’s
PAC12 COY in 2020 and 2023
That’s in 3 full seasons because his first year was the Covid Year.
UCLA and USC are in different universes in terms of boosters. UCLA had Sam Gilbert back in the Wooden years, but he only cared about basketball. Boosters there now have absolutely no influence and boosters like to have influence.
Example: my source on USC is a UCLA grad. Played football and baseball both there. Made a fortune after graduation in a business tangentially related to music. Hated USC with a passion growing up and in college. But, he gave up on UCLA football when they hired Karl Dorrell as head coach.
He became friendly with Pete Carroll because they were neighbors when Carroll was the USC coach and ended up getting involved with USC boosters. He likes the influence he and other boosters have. He likes the fact that Riley meets with them regularly. He admits it’s an ego trip, but to come to UCLA as a walk-on and end up all-conference in both football and baseball required an ego. He still follows UCLA baseball but could care less about the football program.
I’ve heard some things from people who would know, but this doesn’t surprise me. What I can say is UCLA tries to do the bare minimum with spending, talking facilities(practice) and transportation. I’m not sure about their NIL efforts because these comments pre-date NIL, but I’d say the comments were less than a year to year and a half before NIL became a thing. There’s reasons that USC is consistently getting better recruits out of high school the last five or so years. Not that UCLA recruiting has been bad, but it’s below blue blood level for sure
Well we all know a coach who went there and made three Final Fours in his first four seasons there but ended up getting fired after winning the PAC12 championship after they got bounced in the first round.
To be fair though, that's because the gap between what the school's boosters think their program is and what it actually is is much greater for UCLA basketball than just about any other program in the country.
A Final Four and THEN 58 wins in 2 years but bounced in S16 both years. He is winning a ton. I dont deny he could end up at Louisville though.
And then this year, 5-6 in the non-conference with the five wins against a D2 plus Pomeroy ranked teams 244, 343, 349 and 350. And a loss to 237.
If they don't get a lot better really fast he might be somewhere else next year whether he wants to be or not.
Howland was fired because of the SI article and five straight years of no sweet 16s. Cronin hasn't had a scandal or a rough stretch across multiple seasons.
I do hope he comes to the ACC. We need to land big coaches.
Howland was fired because the UCLA boosters think that they should be in the Final Four almost every year, and they should win the championship every couple seasons at worst.
Meanwhile, in the real world, since their vacated Final Four in 1980, so 43 seasons now, UCLA has made the Final Four three times with Howland as coach and twice with every other coach combined. In the last 25 years they've won five conference championships, the one that Cronin won and then four of them that Howland won.
Too many UCLA boosters think that it's their birthright to be as good at basketball today as they were when they combined one of the greatest coaches with the cheatingest program in the whole country, and they can't understand why that hasn't been the case for literally decades.
The closest anyone has gotten them to that in the last nearly 50 years is Ben Howland. But they were too dumb to see what they had and what their place in the current college basketball world actually is.
C'mom man. It was three final fours in his first FIVE seasons!!
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