UCLA Missing Its Local Flavor

For the first time since the 1984-85 season, the UCLA men’s basketball team won’t play a nonconference game against another Southland school.

The Bruins’ 2005-06 schedule was released Monday with such home opponents as Cal State Sacramento, Albany, Wagner, Delaware State and Coppin State, but no Long Beach State, Pepperdine, UC Irvine, Cal State Northridge, Cal State Fullerton, UC Riverside or Loyola Marymount.

Instead of Notre Dame, the Bruins will play NCAA regional finalist West Virginia in the middle of the Pacific 10 Conference season and will travel to Michigan in December. Also, UCLA will play host to New Mexico State in the first round of the Preseason preseason NIT and will meet Nevada at the Arrowhead Pond in the Wooden Classic. Depending on how they do, the Bruins could play as many as three more games in the NIT, including two in New York if they win twice.

UCLA Coach Ben Howland said the lack of local schools on the nonconference schedule is not a permanent situation.

“It was not on purpose at all,” Howland said. “There were some schedule conflicts and some money issues. Often [local] teams can play for more money elsewhere.”

There had been the possibility of a Fullerton-UCLA matchup in the Preseason NIT. Fullerton Coach Bob Burton had been quoted in the Daily Titan, the school’s newspaper, saying that Howland had refused to play Fullerton, which made a late-season run in the postseason NIT, and that Howland had gone so far as to threaten to pull out of the tournament rather than play Fullerton.

Howland said that his reluctance to play Fullerton came because he doesn’t like to compete against close friends. “Bob and I are very close and I told him that. Bob was kidding about it,” he said.

Instead UCLA will face New Mexico State, which finished 6-24 last season with a computer RPI ranking of 292 out of 330 NCAA Division I schools. Cal State Sacramento’s RPI was 285, Wagner’s 211, Albany’s 198, Coppin State’s 129 and Delaware State’s 103. Only Delaware State had a winning record (19-14).

Howland said West Virginia and UCLA signed a two-year, home-and-home contract but that Notre Dame would return to the schedule in the future.

He also suggested that if UCLA wins two games in the NIT that it probably would be favored in, “we’d have two games in New York against teams like Duke or Alabama or Memphis. That makes the schedule look a little different.”