Does Mick Cronin's irritation with direction of college sports threaten his longevity?
Mick Cronin can sound more like a sports radio talk show host than a college basketball coach given his willingness to freely air his frustrations with the sport.
He’s ripped conference realignment as a soulless money grab to save struggling athletic departments. Savaged agents who tell underdeveloped players they’re ready to go pro. Blasted the commercialization of youth basketball. Questioned the point of governing bodies.
“We only have one rule — there are no rules, it’s all a joke,” Cronin said only a few weeks into UCLA’s season. “Like, literally, there are no rules. We have compliance meetings — why? There’s really only one rule: You can transfer every year.”
Listening to all this and seeing the strain of the last few years on his face, one might wonder whether Cronin is on the verge of firing up the poolside grill in his backyard every afternoon and joining the growing list of veteran coaches who have put down their clipboards and called it a career.
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Tony Bennett was the latest to bid farewell, retiring from Virginia practically on the eve of the season opener. His stunning departure came just five years after winning a national championship and at a relatively youthful 55, with seemingly a few more hundred wins left on his coaching odometer.
Bennett explained that he no longer had the passion needed to compete in the free-for-all that college basketball has become.
“I was equipped to do the job here the old way,” Bennett told reporters at a tearful sendoff.
It was a similar story in previous years for Jay Wright and Roy Williams, Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame coaches who left rather than deal with the headache of raising millions in name, image and likeness funds, re-recruiting their own players every spring and taking cross-country flights for conference games.
“The job’s totally changed,” Cronin recently acknowledged. “It just is what it is. Some guys didn’t want to change with it and they’re on television now, or they’re on a beach. Look, history has taught us one thing, that times change, so you’ve got to be willing to change with the times.”
Is Cronin, in his sixth season with the Bruins, willing to reinvent himself every year? It appears that UCLA fans worried they might lose the last coach to take them to a Final Four can exhale.
“I’m still excited to coach, I want to try to win a championship,” Cronin, 53, told The Times this week with his No. 24 Bruins (8-1) preparing for another oddity — a nonconference game against Arizona (4-4) on Saturday at the Footprint Center in Phoenix now that the former Pac-12 rivals have joined different conferences.
“I think it’s a really privileged position to be able to try to be a male adult role model for your players and try to teach them the things that they’re going to need to be successful in life. To me, it’s a fidelity to a higher cause.”
Two of the biggest changes in the sport — players getting paid and moving from one team to another through the transfer portal, often repeatedly — don’t bother Cronin in the least.
“I don’t sit here thinking, 'Oh, I hate all this,'” Cronin said. “ … If somebody doesn’t want to play for you, it’s probably because he’s going to get more money somewhere else — and you can’t begrudge people for that.”
But what about having to rebuild a roster on what seems like an annual basis? Cronin just brought in six transfers and three freshmen one year after importing eight newcomers.
Cronin said if his team had its current NIL funding in place a year ago, it likely would have landed the transfers it needed to stabilize the roster. Instead, the Bruins pivoted to seven freshmen and one transfer on their way to a losing record, necessitating more mass turnover.
In some ways, nothing has changed when it comes to building a team.
“Let’s not act like recruiting was fun before the transfer portal,” Cronin said with a laugh. “I mean, let’s not act like, 'Oh, now we’ve got the portal.' … I mean, recruiting has always been a brutal business, you know?”
Showing his players how to act off the court, Cronin said, is just as meaningful to him as making sure they master the nuances of his demanding defense.
“Once we have our team together every year,” Cronin said, “I have a chance to impact young men, and I think our society’s in desperate need of making sure that we’re helping young males learn how to be a man of character in our country. I think it’s grossly lacking.
“Just because they’re getting money, they’re still kids. They still need direction — men in our society need to teach young men how to be a man and I like being in that position as much as I like coaching basketball.”
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What sorts of lessons have his players learned?
“Just how to carry yourself, you know?” senior forward Kobe Johnson said. “You’ve got to be a good person, you’ve got to treat everybody with respect.”
Junior point guard Dylan Andrews, who has played for Cronin longer than anyone else on the team, said his coach has helped prepare him to be a success in everything he does.
“We talk about financial things, we talk about everyday life,” Andrews said. “I’ve been here for three years so all the talks that we’ve had, man, have just stuck in my brain and I can’t wait to just use them in life.”
Other factors that likely will extend Cronin’s coaching longevity are his appreciation for being the steward of legendary predecessor John Wooden’s program and his love of Southern California. He likes to say he gets to turn left on Sunset Boulevard as part of his commute to work every day from Encino.
There’s also been plenty of success. A two-time Pac-12 coach of the year, Cronin has guided UCLA to two appearances in the NCAA tournament’s Sweet 16 in addition to that Final Four run in 2021. Two years ago, the Bruins won the Pac-12 title in a runaway, topping second-place Arizona by four games.
In 2022, UCLA rewarded Cronin with a contract that runs through the 2027-28 season and made him the highest-paid public-school coach in the Pac-12 before the conference disbanded in August.
Cronin’s reciprocal loyalty has kept him from pursuing recent openings at other high-profile schools such as Kentucky and Louisville. He’s said he would like his school to help more with the fundraising needed to secure top talent but acknowledged that the proposed House settlement with the NCAA could change the way players are compensated.
Other uncertainty includes schools’ willingness to help players who have transferred multiple times pay for their degrees after their professional careers — “It ain’t like the old days where you played for four years, gave them your heart and soul, you need a couple of semesters, they’re going to pay for it,” Cronin said — and the possible elimination of some Olympic sports as a result of the new college sports business model.
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“All these schools are going to have to start cutting sports and it’s sad,” Cronin said. “Where’s the money going to come from? You’ve just got $30 million more a year you’ve got to pay out — $10 million to the [House] settlement, $20 million to the players [through revenue sharing], where are you going to get that $30 million?”
Perhaps Cronin’s biggest ally in his bid to keep coaching is his wry sense of humor.
“I really struggle with the hypocrisy of where we’re all at with the whole thing,” Cronin said. “I’m not actually going to struggle with it, I use it as comedy — I need some comedy in my life; there’s a lot of comedy.”
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
