As Tydides said there is not a lot to say after the latest disgraceful performance by a Ben Howland "coached" UCLA basketball on Nell and John Wooden Court. We don't really have to detail the arguments right now about why Ben should have been fired last year. We have been doing it for a while here on BN - and you can go through the all posts tagged under "Ben Howland era at UCLA" to read up on posts after posts building out the case against Howland.
Still I am sure many are wondering what exactly Howland had to say after tonight's debacle at Pauley. Edward Lewis of BruinSportsReport.com posted the video of Howland's post game presser. Not surprisingly Howland sounds pathetic and also delusional. The lowlights:
- Howland haplessly started out by saying that the Trojans "outphysicaled" his team on our own home floor. Get that - a UCLA team which had the number 1 recruiting class in the country, got out-physicaled by a Trojan team, coached by an "interim coach" and made up of bunch of scrubs. Still tonight we had Don MacLean sounding like Baghdad Bob, waxing poetic about how the Bruin defense has improved this season.
- Not surprisingly Howland used Shabazz's stomach flu as an excuse discussing how he had to take 2 liters of IV fluid before the game. Well, whose fault is that the Bruins have no depth. Yet, comically last weekend Marques Johnson was busy pushing out the talking point of "addition by subtraction" suggesting how Bruins were better off w/o Joshua Smith and Tyler Lamb with no depth on the bench.
- Oh speaking of the bench, Ben also threw in "I've got to play my bench more." LOLz.
- Unbelievably Ben Howland "doesn't think" his program's "attitude needs to change." He instead talked about how Bruins lost to a "top-10" Oregon team at home (the same Ducks who were PWNed by a less than mediocre Stanford team at Maples. He then hilariously tried to hype up the JustSC basketball team by suggesting it was okay for the Bruins to lose those 9-13 clowns at Pauley because the Trogans had played a "tough schedule."
If UCLA was led by a competent athletic director with any sense of respect and reverence for the history and tradition of Bruin basketball program (Bill Walton called the loss "tragic" and "sacrilegious" as it happened on Reggie Miller's jersey retirement night), Howland should be the shown the door tomorrow.
arminla's comment in our post game thread is worth highlighting here tonight:
They had 17 turnovers, to our 7!
They had two players with at least four fouls, I believe with 7 minutes left in the second half. Our "coach" could not take advantage of this.
They out rebounded us by 8 and they were able to take advantage of this.
They practically wanted to give us this game.
They beat us, with an interim coach, on our floor, with our top recruiting class in the nation.
Outright embarrassing. He should have been fired before he got to the locker room.
Howland mumbled during the presser, "we've got some soul-searching to do." He should be doing it somewhere else besides Westwood as a former UCLA basketball.
GO BRUINS.