Make California Post a Preferred Source Well, it happened. Bob Chesney was right.
UCLA got itself a good football team and now has arguably the most dominant athletic department in the country.
A glance at the latest national rankings Monday confirmed it. A fourth-ranked football team. A ninth-ranked men’s basketball team. A 10th-ranked women’s basketball team.
UCLA is the only school besides Texas that can boast having all three of its major programs in the top 10.
Notre Dame can’t claim that. Neither can Alabama. Nor can Tennessee.
It’s the first time the Bruins have all three teams in the top 10 since January 1999. Gen Xers and Baby Boomers will recall that’s when the football team was coming off a Rose Bowl appearance, the men’s basketball team was rolling with Steve Lavin and the women’s basketball team was on its way to the Elite Eight.
Remember, this is an athletic program that won 10 national titles under John Wooden and seven consecutive bowl games under Terry Donahue. Winning once felt like a Bruin birthright.
In recent decades, that collective dominance had faded like the banners hanging inside Pauley Pavilion.
What’s most significant about this renaissance is that it appears sustainable, so long as UCLA can lock up Chesney with an extension. That’s a must given how many suitors – college and NFL – will need to be warded off when it comes to perhaps the hottest coach on the market.
Fortunately, it appears that Chesney’s counterparts on campus are already committed to being around for a while.
Women’s basketball coach Cori Close, fresh off an NCAA championship, recently signed a four-year extension and is here to stay unless the lure of the WNBA proves irresistible.
Men’s basketball coach Mick Cronin appears reinvigorated by a roster capable of taking the Bruins on their deepest postseason run since they made the 2021 Final Four. After three consecutive dismaying seasons, there’s no more joking about jumping off the Coronado Bridge for a coach who is back to smiling like he often did with the Jaime Jaquez Jr.-Tyger Campbell teams of yore.
The Olympic sports are also doing their thing, the men’s water polo, women’s soccer, women’s golf and men’s soccer teams all ranked in the top 25.
Behind it all are a chancellor and athletic director who represent UCLA’s best combination in that department since Chuck Young and J.D. Morgan were running the place in tandem nearly a half-century ago.
Chancellor Julio Frenk has shown he’s not the kind of leader who just shows up at games and sends out a few complimentary tweets. He canned underperforming athletic director Martin Jarmond, acknowledged the importance of athletics as the “front porch” of the university and began the tedious process of extracting the school from terrible legacy deals that included not having the rights to its own logo.
Frenk also hired Tim Harris, the new CEO and athletic director who bleeds blue and gold in a way that his predecessor did not. Harris has personally sprung for tickets, made student tickets free and is doing everything humanly possible to fill the Rose Bowl and Pauley Pavilion.
These teams are making it fun to go back to those venues.
A first-year coach forms a roster with 63 newcomers, loses his starting quarterback in the fifth game and just keeps winning. UCLA is 9-0 for the first time since 1998 and a couple of wins away from securing a berth in the Big Ten title game and College Football Playoff.
How’s that sitting over at Heritage Hall, where USC needs a late-season surge in Year 5 under Lincoln Riley just to come anywhere close to what Chesney is doing in Year 1?
UCLA isn’t just going to make the CFP but could also win a couple of games considering its ability to always find a way.
Teams stuff the box to stop the run game? Quarterback Ty Dieffenbach will beat you with back-to-back deep shots.
Offense seems stuck in mud? The defense will force turnovers to get the ball back and give its buddies on the other side of the ball more chances to get rolling.
Cronin’s team features the most precocious star on campus, a 17-year-old who might very well go on to become UCLA’s first No. 1 overall NBA draft pick since Bill Walton.
Nikola Kusturica does a lot of everything, the small forward with the big-time game pouring in 29 points, 6 rebounds, 3 assists, 2 blocks, 1 steal and 0 turnovers in only 29 minutes last week during a 114-63 clobbering of North Florida.
There’s plenty more to this team than one emerging superstar. Transfer guard Jaylen Petty is a naturally gifted shooter and freshman forward Joe Philon III is quickly becoming a fan favorite for his hustle and fearlessness. This fun bunch should start packing Pauley Pavilion like the Lonzo Ball season a decade ago.
Maybe the most amazing thing about this team is that everybody can come back next season, though there’s no point in waiting to dominate.
Close’s team has the talent to get back to the Final Four for a third consecutive season. The frontcourt of Sienna Betts and Timea Gardiner can match up with any in the country and an infusion of transfers – including guard Elina Aarnisalo, who decided there was something finer than North Carolina and returned to UCLA – is writing a new narrative that might look a lot like what preceded it.
It doesn’t take a journalism major to discover what’s happening around campus when it comes to Bruins sports.
The place got itself a good football team. Now watch out.
