THE BITTER END : UC Irvine’s Staggering Finish Removes the Luster From Season’s Few Shining Moments

“This has been one of those seasons when you wish someone would put an asterisk next to the record.”

--UC Irvine Coach Bill Mulligan

Bill Mulligan has been coaching for 33 years and says he can’t remember a season so wrought with illness and injury.

But some might suggest that the footnote next to the asterisk following UC Irvine’s disappointing 12-17 1988-89 season should read: Coach changed the game plan more often than his socks.

Certainly, the Anteaters’ inside game suffered because of deep thigh bruises to center Mike Doktorczyk and forward Ricky Butler. Each missed a lot of practice and one game because of the injury. And a couple of key players missed games with the flu.

Still, Irvine’s struggles this season might have had more to do with something Mulligan caught--Philosophy Flip-Flop Fever. He switched the offensive and defensive schemes so many times in the early season, not even the players can remember how often.

The Anteaters were a pressing, running team. Then they were a sagging, man-to-man defensive team with a deliberate offense. And they were everything in between.

Mulligan switched the plan from week to week. He changed it from game to game. At least once, he changed it at halftime.

All of which left more than a few players confused about their roles.

Mulligan went into the year “more excited than I’ve ever been.” He believed that he finally had the athletes to play the way he has always wanted to play, a full-court press defense and a run-and-gun offense.

These Anteaters were going to to lead the nation in scoring and fill the 5,000-seat Bren Center for every game.

But all Irvine accomplished was humiliating itself while opponents scored at a rate surpassed only by layup drills.

“We blew it early in the year, doing all that crazy stuff,” Mulligan said. “We didn’t get to practice what we ended up doing. We were working on things in February we should have been doing Oct. 15.

“It’s my fault we got so far behind. That’s my responsibility. I just blew it.”

In January, Mulligan discovered how to win with the players he had. The Anteaters began to concentrate on getting the ball inside to their big men, Doktorczyk and Butler. If defenses sagged too much, the Anteaters’ accurate outside shooters kept them honest.

Between Jan. 19 and Feb. 18, Irvine was 7-3. The Anteaters were running on all cylinders . . . and this team had a big engine:

--Guard Rod Palmer, who averaged 15 points on the year, scored 20 to lead Irvine in the first victory over Fresno State Jan. 19.

--Two days later, Doktorczyk, a senior who led the team in scoring (16 points per game) and rebounding (eight), made all 12 field goal attempts and scored a career-high 28 in the first of three victories over University of the Pacific.

--Butler, a 6-foot-7 sophomore who started the season somewhere close to 300 pounds but survived the fat jokes and became a major factor in Irvine’s midseason resurgence, scored 23 and grabbed seven rebounds in the Anteaters’ next victory, a 77-73 victory over Cal State Fullerton.

--Sophomore forward Jeff Herdman, the No. 1 in the nation in three-point shooting for three weeks before falling into a late-season slump, made nine of 11 shots from the floor and scored 24 points in the Feb. 4 upset of then-16th-ranked Nevada Las Vegas.

--Senior Kevin Floyd, the high-flying, acrobatic crowd-pleaser who tamed his temptation to recklessly charge the basket every time he touched the ball to become a semi-level-headed point guard, hit an off-balance, leaning three-pointer against Pacific to send the game into overtime. Irvine won, 95-92. Floyd scored 25.

Defense, however, remained a problem. Irvine’s interior defense was chronically weak and, as a result, opponents made more than half of their field-goal attempts.

Still, when Irvine unleashed all its offensive potential on one night, the Anteaters could outscore almost anyone.

They erupted to beat UCLA on Dec. 28 and Las Vegas on Feb. 4.

“Those wins were obviously the ups,” Mulligan said, “but there were a lot of downs. We weren’t able to win enough of the other games. We beat some very good teams, but we didn’t beat the teams we felt we should have beaten.”

Indeed, there were a lot of low lights before, between and after Floyd’s streaking, coast-to-coast layup at the buzzer carried Irvine to a 91-90 victory over the Bruins and Herdman’s fifth three-pointer of the night put the Anteaters ahead by nine in the final minutes of the 99-98 victory over Las Vegas.

For instance:

LOW--Irvine, the team with preseason dreams of leading the country in scoring and stealing some of that publicity from Loyola Marymount, loses to Georgia State in the season opener, 109-84. It isn’t pretty. It looks as if the Anteaters might lead the nation in points allowed.

LOWER--Irvine makes a three-game mid-December road swing with stops in the desert, the Midwest and the South. It’s no vacation. The Anteaters lose to Las Vegas, Loyola of Chicago and Virginia to run their road record to 0-4. Then they lose four of their next five road games in Big West Conference play and are 1-7 away from the Bren Center.

LOWEST--The victory over the Rebels had been preceded by an almost equally satisfying victory over Fullerton in Titan Gym. And two weeks after beating Las Vegas, the Anteaters were celebrating their first victory in Fresno State’s Selland Arena. The triumphant team returned to finish the season with a four-game home stand. A sweep would mean a second-place finish in the Big West.

The Anteaters lost all four.

“It was really disappointing. All year, we’d have the little lapses on defense, but we always felt like we could come back with our offense. We learned you can’t rely on it all the time.”

Irvine, once No. 6 in the country in three-point field goal accuracy, learned the hard way. A cold shooting hand is a cruel teacher. The Anteaters made just 15 of 60 three-point attempts during the four-game flop.

“That’s what hurt us,” Mulligan said Thursday night after Las Vegas had ended Irvine’s season with a 102-82 romp in the second round of the Big West tournament. “Losing those last four . . . that’s what really hurt.”