In Reply to: Not to defend FTW posted by Cachorro on August 13, 2026 at 09:38:31
Guys...Howland is so far beyond Cronin, by every conceivable metric, that it's embarrassing to even have to lay this out for my fellow Bruin fans.
Howland took a Pitt program that hadn't been to the S16 since 1974 to two straight S16s before getting the UCLA job. He was also only at Pitt for 4 seasons, so it didn't take him long to make a contender out of what had up to then been a weak, irrelevant program.
At UCLA, he inherited a program that Lavin could never really take to the next level, and in only three years, Howland had us back in the national championship discussion.
Let's compare that to Cronin. He inherited a strong Cincy program from Bob Huggins in 2006 (unlike Howland with Pitt), and in 13 seasons at Cincy, Cronin got to one S16. That's his crowning achievement. And yet, somehow that made him a good candidate for the UCLA job.
Ben Howland is also a much better developer of talent than Cronin, attested to by the many guys he coached who turned into good pros (Love, Westbrook, Collison, et al).
I could go on, but this feels pointless.
Howland is vastly better than Cronin. It's not debatable.