PHILADELPHIA — Those four letters that Mick Cronin always talks about?
They’re the ones on the front of his team’s uniforms, the ones that John Wooden’s teams made famous wherever the language of college basketball was spoken. And they’re the same ones that 10 successors have tried to uphold, with varying degrees of success but the same amount of pressure from UCLA alumni of a certain age who remember those 10 NCAA championships in 12 seasons from 1964 through 1975.
Cronin, whose seventh-seeded Bruins face Central Florida in an East Regional first-round game here Friday evening, has now been in Westwood seven seasons and reached the NCAA Tournament in five. This will be UCLA’s 54th visit to the tournament all told, its 51st in 65 seasons dating to 1962 and its 16th in the last 22 years.
There was no tournament in 2020 because of COVID, and the Bruins missed the dance in 2024, the last season of the Pac-12 as we knew it, with a 16-17 record. I’m sure Cronin heard about it, similar to the old story – maybe true, maybe apocryphal – of the alum who went up to Wooden after the 1975 title game in San Diego, his last, and informed the coach that winning that one made up for not winning it the previous year.
Hey, UCLA alumni can be a tough crowd.
And say what you will about Cronin’s, um, high-volume style of coaching, but he gets it.
“I had a great job” when he was approached by UCLA after Steve Alford was fired, Cronin recalled here Thursday. “I was close to being the winningest coach ever at Cincinnati, and I left because I had a chance to coach at UCLA, which I regard as the best job – to sit in Coach Wooden’s chair and coach at the best university in the country, arguably the world, and everything that goes with it.”
Earlier in the week, he explained what that legacy really means, and why Friday against UCF is the the start of the Bruins’ real season.
“We’re at UCLA, so the regular season is to get better (and) earn your way into the NCAA Tournament,” he said. “(The) conference tournament is practice on playing with the effort you need to play with to do what you want to do and advance in the NCAA Tournament.
“So everything we do here is about this week, everything. And you know, it’s been that way since I took the job and that’s just the way it should be for anybody that wears the four letters and coaches here in basketball.”
But, he added, that seems to have become a phenomenon in a lot of places. For example, imagine the angst Duke fans were feeling Thursday while their top-seeded Blue Devils trailed No. 16 Siena by 11 points at halftime before coming back to win, 71-65.
“I have friends of mine that have had great regular seasons, won the conference tournament,” he said. “You get knocked out the first weekend, your fans are (mad). Your media is on you. … Michigan won (the Big Ten Tournament) this year. OK, if they don’t go to the Final Four, go ahead, go and see what their fans say.”
No wonder he responded to a number of questions at Monday’s on-campus media session by reminding everyone that he was concerned with UCF. The Knights, seeded 10th in the East and earning the first at-large bid in program history, were 21-11 in the regular season but 9-9 in Big XII play and have lost four of their past five games, including an 81-59 loss to No. 2 Arizona in the second round of the conference tournament.
But March is unpredictable, as became clear Thursday with the Duke scare and 12th-seeded High Point’s 83-82 upset of fifth-seeded Wisconsin.
“They’re super athletic,” UCLA guard Skyy Clark said Thursday. “They have a lot of scorers. They’ve got some really good guard play. They have a super tall center (7-foot-2 sophomore John Bol, who averages 6.0 points, 5.5 rebounds and 1.06 blocked shots per game), and they’re super aggressive. The iso ball, they can really take it off the dribble and everything. They have a really good point guard as well (6-2 Themus Fulks, who averages 6.7 assists), so we have to lock in on really staying in front of the ball.”
Added fellow Bruins guard Donovan Dent: “Yeah, they’re a really heavy iso-oriented team, and we have to guard our yard, basically. A lot of one-on-one defense in this game.”
And yes, Dent’s presence at Thursday’s media session is a pretty good indication that he will be playing Friday night after being injured in their Big Tent Tournament semifinal loss to Purdue. The other Bruin injured during the conference tournament, Tyler Bilodeau, is less of a certainty according to some reports, though Cronin noted they both “looked good” in a closed practice before the Bruins’ public shooting session Thursday at Xfinity Mobile Arena.
Obviously, these are programs at different ends of the spectrum. UCF is in its third season in the Big XII after playing in the American Conference and before that Conference USA. It has made six NCAA Tournament appearances all time, and this is just its second since 2006.
The only time it got out of the first round was 2019, Johnny Dawkins’ third season as head coach, when the Knights were 24-9, defeated Virginia Commonwealth, 73-58, as a No. 9 seed and lost to Duke (Dawkins’ alma mater) by a point, 77-76.
How much does this mean to the university based in Orlando? A lot, said guard Devin Cambridge, a sixth-year player who faced UCLA when he played at Arizona State and also has played at Auburn and Texas Tech. (Such school-hopping is, for what it’s worth, no longer atypical in college basketball.)
“In the gym, you don’t see too many banners, especially championships,” Cambridge said. “That’s been a goal all year, to win a championship. We missed out on the regular season and Big XII. This is the last chance to go and do that.”
Every program has its own set of priorities and expectations, and these might as well be different worlds.
“A lot comes with these four letters we wear on our chest,” Dent said.
It can be a burden, especially since – as has happened so often during UCLA’s NCAA Tournament appearances – Bruins players are dealing with final exams this week because the school is on the quarter system.
But if the players who wear those four letters truly seize the opportunity, they could be legends for years to come.
jalexander@scng.com
