College Basketball is Better with a Strong Arizona-UCLA Rivalry
Third-ranked Arizona visits Pauley Pavilion and No. 7 UCLA on Tuesday in the first of two meetings between the two in a nine-day span, and college basketball really couldn’t ask for a better series to usher in February.
First, I must stress that February is a perfect college hoops month. I wouldn’t say I enjoy it more than March, but February is a necessary ingredient to making the Madness. Consequential games are played nightly and the sport largely has the stage to itself with football essentially complete and the NBA transitioning into its dog days after the All-Star Break.
February is a time for thrilling conference games that burst bubbles, establish resumes, and most importantly, determine champions. Arizona and UCLA have played dozens of these games against each other since the mid-1980s when Lute Olson began to build UA into an upper-echelon program.
Since 1986, Arizona and UCLA combine for 25 Pac-10/12 championships, nine Final Four appearances, and two national titles. And with this season’s matchups, the Bruins and Wildcats can cement theirs as the sport’s greatest rivalry outside of Duke-North Carolina.
As with so much else in college basketball, the foundation starts with John Wooden. The legendary coach was retired once Arizona joined the Pac-8 Conference in the late ‘70s, but Olson was among the many who counted the Wizard of Westwood as a mentor.
In 1986, Arizona sealed its first Pac-10 championship with the program’s first win over the Bruins in Los Angeles since 1923. The documentary Memories ‘88 chronicling UA’s first Final Four run recounts the story of Wooden signing the game program for Olson, which hung on the wall of Coach O’s office thereafter.
The defeat of UCLA in March ‘86 was an important pillar for Olson building Arizona into a national powerhouse. It also unofficially though effectively started a rivalry.
UCLA was so dominant over the college basketball landscape, it lacked a true basketball rival. There’s animus between the Bruins and crosstown counterpart USC, but it’s more of a football rivalry due to the Trojans’ lack of historic consistency in basketball.
Ralph Miller coached some great Oregon State teams in the late ‘70s through the ‘80s, but the Beavers never quite reached heights approaching those of UCLA — and they certainly didn’t sustain their peak.
Arizona’s first Pac-10 title in 1986, however, was the first of nine the Wildcats won by the end of the 20th Century. During that stretch, UA played in three Final Fours (with a fourth immediately after), began an NCAA Tournament streak that lasted until 2010, and won a national championship.
Over that same stretch, UCLA won Pac-10 championships, snapped Arizona’s historic 73-game home-court winning streak in 1992, and in 1995 won the last of its 11 national championships.
The Wildcats’ 1997 title was the first claimed by a Western program outside of Westwood since Cal in 1959, and is the last such championship in the 25 years since.
That contributes to the electricity and importance of this season’s Arizona-UCLA matchups. Both the Wildcats and Bruins look like national championship contenders, which hasn’t coincided nearly as often since the start of the 21st Century as in the ‘90s when the rivalry took off.
UCLA bottomed out in the early 2000s, leading to the dismissal of Steve Lavin1. Successor Ben Howland returned the Bruins to national prominence with a run of three straight Final Fours, which coincided with Olson’s career winding down for health reasons and Arizona declining as a result.
There were a few brief windows when both regained the old spark simultaneously — the Pac-12 Championship Game in 2014 is a classic, and the 2017 series provided the same intensity of the ‘90s encounters.
Those peaks didn’t last through a combination of Steve Alford’s inconsistency as UCLA head coach, and Arizona enduring three pedestrian years coinciding with the NCAA’s investigation into Sean Miller.
Under Mick Cronin and Tommy Lloyd, the rivalry has the framework to reestablish itself not just as the best in the West, but as the sport’s biggest rivalry off Tobacco Road.
Cronin seemed like an odd fit when named as Alford’s replacement in 2019, having emphasized a methodical offensive approach and grinding defensive mentality at Cincinnati. Ahead of his first season, however, Cronin told me in an interview for Lindy’s Sports that he grew up a huge fan of the Showtime Lakers and suggested Los Angeles basketball fans who prefer a more open style would appreciate what UCLA had in store.
And, indeed, the Bruins boast one of the nation’s top 20 offenses in adjusted efficiency, and a top 30 scoring offense with four players putting up more than 11 points per game. The free-wheeling style Johnny Juzang and Jaime Jaquez Jr. employ on the perimeter, which buoyed UCLA to last season’s Final Four, makes for an exciting style that doesn’t come at the expense of Cronin’s usual defensive intensity.
Likewise, Lloyd came from Gonzaga, where the nation’s highest-scoring offense every season typically resides, and has birthed a renaissance in his first season.
Sean Miller favored an offense with rigid sets to balance a pack-line defense. It was mostly successful in his tenure, but the antithesis of the explosive and entertaining style that defined Olson’s teams.
Thus far in 2021-22, Arizona ranks second in scoring offense and boasts the nation’s second-fastest tempo. Azuolas Tubelis and Christian Koloko give UA ridiculous length, while Kerr Kriisa carries the banner for the Point Guard U. reputation established under Olson.
That both teams can score makes for an enjoyable product from a spectator perspective, and a pitch for recruits who want to play an NBA style. This year’s meetings should only be the start of annual battles with Cronin and Lloyd building these programs to endure turnover.
What’s more, the fire for the rivalry has never gone out. While other premier rivalries were sacrificed at the altar of Football TV Rights Gods — rivalries like Georgetown and Syracuse or Kansas and Missouri — there’s never been threat of this series ending.
And while the mutual peaks have been fleeting in the 2000s, there have been enough to remind new generations what the rivalry means. I covered the 2017 game at Pauley Pavilion and can definitively it’s one of the most electric atmospheres I have ever experienced.
It was exactly the kind of atmosphere that makes college basketball special, particularly at this time of year when the game captures national attention. While I would prefer the two games being split for the second to be closer to the end of the regular, there isn’t a rivalry more ideal for ushering in the heart of the college hoops calendar.
Despite a dismal final season in Lavin’s tenure, the 2002-03 Bruins kept the spirit of the rivalry going with an upset that arguably kept Arizona from winning its second national championship. UA was cruising to the No. 1 overall seed in the 2003 NCAA Tournament before dropping a stunning decision to UCLA in the Pac-10 Tournament. Arizona still received a No. 1 seed on Selection Sunday, but the loss presumably saddled the Wildcats with Kansas as its bracket No. 2 seed. The Jayhawks were the strongest 2-seed in the field, and knocked off UA in an Elite Eight nail-biter. Kansas went on to lose an all-time classic National Championship Game to Syracuse, which ended with Roy Williams famously shouting, “I don’t give a SHIT about North Carolina!” at Bonnie Bernstein.