COLLEGE PARK, Md. — After Mick Cronin got what he wanted — to be tossed in a nine-point game with 5:14 remaining in Friday night’s eventual 79-61 loss to Maryland — UCLA’s coach made a beeline for the locker room.
When he got there, Cronin went straight to his phone and pulled up the Watch Duty app. Helpless more than 2,700 miles away, Cronin was checking the interactive map of wildfire activity to see if the blazes in Los Angeles had moved closer to his home.
“Fires are coming over Mulholland, to Encino,” Cronin said Friday night, adding, “I was texting Chrissy at my house, who’s my de facto wife and longtime girlfriend, to make sure everybody’s OK and they’re ready to go if they got to go. I got people in that locker room, people evacuated yesterday, that are here on our travel party. I mean, this is as bad as can be.”
Multiple massive wildfires in greater Los Angeles have dominated the national news cycle since Tuesday and will continue to be the primary story in the United States for days to come. The destruction in Pacific Palisades, Malibu, Altadena and beyond has turned into one of the more costly natural disasters in United States history, with untold billions in damages as the fires char swaths of land and obliterate communities in Southern California. Cronin, his assistants and many of their colleagues at UCLA know people who’ve lost their homes (including Los Angeles Lakers coach JJ Redick). Cronin’s been on edge about losing his as well, and the anxiety level is exacerbated by the fact that all this is happening while UCLA is in the midst of a five-day road trip on the opposite side of the country. (The team’s next game is Monday at Rutgers.)
“I was giving a friend of mine my Nike account password yesterday so he could get clothes for his family,” Cronin said.
It’s been a hell of a week for Cronin, perhaps the most challenging of his career. No. 22 UCLA started 10-1 but is now 11-5 after its fourth loss in five games, the two most recent defeats being high-profile due to Cronin’s words and behavior. His postgame press conference Tuesday night after a 94-75 home loss to No. 24 Michigan began with a diatribe against his team that prompted reaction beyond the world of college basketball. About an hour after he made those comments, Cronin was at his house and packing his most treasured personal items in case he had to evacuate. The bags are still sitting by his front door.
“My house is getting real close to being evacuated,” Cronin told me Friday night.
For as frustrating as it is to fly cross-country and take a beatdown loss to Maryland, the result isn’t registering all that heavily with him at the moment. Is it fair to give Cronin a little more leeway for his behavior? His pointed words for his players on Tuesday and his sidelines antics on Friday are up for criticism, but keep in mind they’ve coincided with a major crisis, both personal and communal, that’s recalibrating matters.
“It’s the worst situation back home that puts a lot of stuff in perspective,” Cronin said. “The basketball stuff’s secondary, to be honest with you, it really is.”
From the outside looking in, Friday’s ejection might have seemed like Cronin was still boiling over from anger with his team, but that wasn’t the case. His double technical was a breaking point with the refs. Cronin was irate because he thought Maryland was way too physical and wasn’t getting called on it. Eleven minutes (in real time) before Cronin was ejected, lead official Jeff Anderson allowed a histrionic Cronin to vent to him for nearly a minute after a timeout was called with eight minutes and change remaining.
The lobbying wasn’t effective.
With a little more than five minutes on the clock in the second half, after Terps forward Julian Reese made contact on a loose ball with UCLA’s William Kyle III — with no whistle to follow — Cronin blew his seventh or eighth gasket of the night and got the boot.
“In defense of my guys, I didn’t think we were given any chance to win in the second half, I let Jeff Anderson know, and I hit the showers,” Cronin said.
The double tech led to four free throws, which increased Maryland’s lead to 13. A blip later, Ja’Kobi Gillespie hit a 3-pointer to make it 69-54 and it was a wrap. The 18-point win was the Terrapins’ largest margin of victory over a ranked team since 2008.
Cronin, who couldn’t remember the last time he tried to get tossed, said his team got a bad whistle. He said he wanted Anderson to eject him and that the show he put on for the Maryland crowd was done in defense of his players. He’s also got issues with how the Big Ten is staffing its officials for his games.
“I had enough,” Cronin said. “I’m sending a message. I’m tired of it. I know we’re the outsider and all that — us, USC and Oregon — but that was ridiculous.”
He’s referring to the West Coast teams that joined the Big Ten in 2024 (Washington included) in the mass conference realignment, driven by football, that’s significantly altered the landscape of college basketball as well. There’s quite clearly plenty on Cronin’s mind and he wanted to get a lot of it out Friday night.
“You get on the road against a team that’s 1-2 in the league, but they’re really a top 25 team … they’re gonna do whatever they’ve got to do,” Cronin said. “And we needed some stronger officials on the game, in my opinion.”
Cronin credited Maryland afterward as well, and he owned up to the fact that his team’s defense has sagged and its tendencies for turnovers has gotten much worse. The Bruins had a season-high 21 giveaways Friday night.
“I’ve been in these bloodbath leagues before,” Cronin said, recalling his days at Cincinnati in the old Big East. “You got to get through it and get to the NCAA tournament and everything else is like, where you finish in it doesn’t matter. … You’ve just got to keep fighting through it, and you’re going to have runs like this. It’s just going to inevitable, unless you got a great team.”
A once-promising Bruins team seems a bit adrift at the moment, understandably so. It can be hard to function and focus to maximum effect when there’s so much destruction, sadness and uncertainty back home.
“It’s just, it’s beyond tragic and it’s not over, is the scary part,” Cronin said. “People that aren’t in LA don’t understand that it’s not over. It’s high winds coming back again. It’s really, it’s really scary.”
Press conference tirades, in-game blow-ups, postgame call-outs of officials. It’s all been a lot. And given the tragedies back home and the harrowing realities that are ongoing, one can help but wonder how Cronin and his team get through this … and how long it will take to do so.
