-Bumped. BN Eds.

UCLA's Athletic Department website is should be the first place to which Bruins' fans turn for information on attending or following events, getting scores (especially for non-revenue sports), and for statistical information for the current season or previous seasons. Unfortunately the UCLA website reflects many of the defining characteristics of our AD: incompetence, indolence, and doltishness.

Indolence: Many at Bruins Nation have commented on the fact that the UCLA Athletic Department website posts scores significantly later than the websites of our opponents. In some cases it's only a few hours later, but sometimes the website reports scores several days after the fact, particularly when our teams play in weekend tournaments. As we've discussed in other posts, for those following non-revenue sports, the best source for up-to-date information about a UCLA sporting event is, sadly, the website of our opponent. In my opinion there's absolutely no excuse for this, although from Dan Guerrero's perspective, FYI - What's wrong with letting someone else do the work?

Incompetence: As I've noted several times in my men's volleyball previews, the UCLA website often fails to report the availability of live streaming of matches. It seems reasonable to assume that the Athletic Department would recognize the benefit of having fans follow UCLA sporting events, yet somehow Dan Guerrero's department can't manage to provide a link to available video streams (e.g. the UCI video stream, the UCSD video stream, etc....). But the problems with the website run far deeper than a failure to provide links to media streams. For example, if you're interested in researching the performance of last year's men's volleyball team, there's a slight problem: according to the UCLA website, the team didn't exist last year. Or let's say you just want to see a list of the results for a particular season; in some cases you'll find them listed in chronological order, in other instances, they're in reverse chronological order, and just for a change of pace, you can find years where the results are being held in a secret location. Best of all, the link for the archives for the 1997-98 season delivers you to "UUCLA 1997 Women's Soccer Schedule/Results." I'm not even sure what offends me most about this: the fact that there is no quality control evident in the construction of the website or the fact that the athletic department employs someone who can't spell UCLA. And before any of the more generous souls at Bruins Nation write off that blooper as a simple typo that just happened to slip inconspicuously through the system like a jelly doughnut passing through Dan Guerrero's intestine, consider the fact that another link in the men's volleyball archives list goes to a page with the heading "UCLA Men's Volley Statistics." I don't know if the website features "UCLA Foot Statistics" or "UCLA Basket Statistics", but I'm past the point of being surprised by the incompetence of Dan Guerrero's Athletic Department.

Although I don't have any professional experience in website design, it seems to me to be a really terrible idea to purposely embed links to blank pages. Furthermore, proper website design should produce consistency in style, both in design and format. And it goes without saying that archived content should be proofed and the links to that content should be checked before the pages are added to the website. Alternatively there's Dan Guerrero's bumbling approach to all things Bruin.

Just in case you're wondering, I didn't spend hours looking for these website blunders. In fact, I didn't search for them at all. I discovered them in the course of trying to collect statistical information for a comment about Noah Allen and then later, in the process of writing a mid-season report on the men's "volley" team. Therefore it's safe to assume that the website is riddled with goofs, boo-boos, flubs, and bungles, which pretty much summarizes Dan Guerrero's efforts as AD. FYI - Didn't I read somewhere that failure is a matter of perspective?

Doltishness - In case there are any Dan Guerrero fans reading this and you feel that I'm being unfair to Dan by focusing on the website's failures with respect to the non-revenue sport of "volley," you probably shouldn't check the season box score for the men's basketball team. According to that official source, our non-conference record this season is 0-0. That's right folks, somehow Dan Guerrero made all the cupcakes disappear faster than a box of doughnuts! Unfortunately, the 11 non-conference wins are gone too. Here's a screen grab for memory's sake:

via s27.postimg.org

Is it unfair to call this an example of stupidity? Honestly, I don't think it's harsh to say that whoever produced this "season box score" should have realized there was something wrong with the 0-0 non-conference record, or the fact that the conference and overall individual stats are identical. That's the kind of thing that jumps right out and grabs the attention of someone who is even just moderately sharp. In this case, the Athletic Department website seems to be once again mirroring the characteristics of the AD. I've never once heard Dan Guerrero described as "sharp;" "well-rounded" perhaps, but definitely not sharp.

I haven't even addressed the often dreadfully poor website content (and I don't intend to), but it too reflects the lack of foresight in understanding how the department's website can play a valuable role in energizing the fanbase and, as a consequence, increasing revenue. Yeah, I know that the whole "internets thing" developed during Dan Guerrero's mature years, but I've heard stories that people over the age of 40 are starting to get the hang of "going online." Is expecting a smart, informative, well-designed, fully-functional Athletic Department website too much to ask? Or should we be satisfied with what Dan Guerrero's Athletic Department is producing? FYI - Can't all this internet stuff go on sandwich boards instead?