I can certainly understand columnists becoming drama queen in hopes to excite/titilate/confound readers. Thats their job. But message board posters seem to
be subject to that malady (death of a program!) as well.
Lets look through a little history with the two local teams.
UCLA-they looked for several decades to find the duplicate of John Wooden..It never happoend and likely wont with changes in the College game. But they fired
Harrick (for an expense report no less-can we say the tip of an iceberg?), after he won an NCAA a few years before, replaced by Steve Lavin. Steve's team
were competitive for a while then he went from 23-9 in 2000-2001 to 21-12 and then 10-19. He was fired and Ben Howland came in. Ben had a new look and his team
struggled at 11-17 in 2003-04 and 18-11 the year after, before going 32-7 in the first of 3 final fours. Turnaround time=1-2 years.
USC- In firng Bibby mid season the team though senior loaded fell to 12-17 in 2004-5. Tim Floyd came in with exactly 4 scholarship players and Lod Stewart was
questionable as one of them. He went 17-13 and then 25-12 and a sweet 16 the year after.
Cal came up from the dregs to playing pretty well with Montgomery coming back to the PAC-10. And many teams recovered from losses to rebound. The average time
for return to prominence was 1-2 years..
So this death knell tio me is what I call premature e-speculation. Unless there's some hidden rampant thing unknown to anyone in the press or on the
internet, this loss of a fine coach hurts badly, but is not a death knell to anyone so far but the worst of the drama queens.


