Grainy game footage and yellowed newspaper clippings confer UCLA’s standing as college basketball royalty, the team’s status as a blue blood rooted in the success of a coach who retired nearly 50 years ago.
John Wooden’s 10 national championships in a 12-year span are more than any other program has won in its history. On the flip side, the Bruins have won just one championship since Wooden’s departure, Jim Harrick’s 1995 team preventing the school from going 0 for the last half century.
North Carolina, the fellow blue blood that the Bruins will face Saturday afternoon at Madison Square Garden in the CBS Sports Classic, has won five of its six titles since 1982. By comparison, the bulk of UCLA’s success can feel like something accomplished on peach baskets.
As the years pass, those banners hanging inside Pauley Pavilion fade like the memories of those championships. UCLA has gone almost 30 years without a title while seven teams have added multiple banners to their collection over that same span. Has the fundamental power structure of the sport changed? Might the Bruins be on the verge of ceding their hallowed status, their blood no longer the deepest shade of blue?
“Hell no,” Marques Johnson, a member of Wooden’s final national championship team in 1975, said this week. “I just don’t think you give up that spot in terms of the prestige and elite-level claim that you deserve based on historically what you’ve done as a program.”
A blue blood, in Johnson’s view, is more of a historic honor than a contemporaneous one, belonging to teams that dominated the sport when it was gaining a foothold in the nation’s consciousness more than 50 years ago. Once you’re in, Johnson said, you never give up membership.
Historical references go back many decades, a 1951 story in the Cincinnati Enquirer describing Xavier’s early season losses as having come against teams listed in “college basketball’s blue blood directory.” The term has long become a favorite of broadcasters even if it was never one that Wooden used, according to Gary Cunningham, who played for the legendary coach before becoming one of his early successors.
Johnson’s bonafide blue bloods — UCLA, Kentucky, North Carolina, Duke and Kansas — largely jibe with the list of the most decorated programs. Kentucky’s eight national championships rank second behind UCLA, followed by North Carolina and Connecticut (six each), Duke and Indiana (five each) and Kansas (four).
While Indiana won titles in 1940 and 1953, the Hoosiers are more widely associated with their success under coach Bobby Knight, who won three more championships in the 1970s and ‘80s. Johnson puts Indiana in his second tier of elite teams.
“We’ve got to slide them in there,” Johnson said, “because they were a little bit late to the party, not exactly nouveau riche but around and dominant long enough where they definitely need to be talked about in the same breath.”
Who does Johnson consider nouveau riche? He listed UConn and Gonzaga, teams that have enjoyed wild success the last few decades but haven’t won enough historically to be considered classic blue bloods. Gonzaga continues to seek its first title, having lost in the championship game in 2017 and 2021.
UCLA’s run of 10 titles from 1964 to 1975 puts the Bruins in a standalone category, according to Johnson.
“That’s something,” Johnson said, “that will never ever be duplicated by any school in history for a number of reasons, as we know — NIL and one-and-dones and all that.”
Even though Duke has won all of its titles since 1991, Johnson said the Blue Devils qualify as a blue blood based on their having been a top team long before that, reaching Final Fours in 1963, 1964 and 1978.
Jay Bilas, a center for the Blue Devils as the team was establishing itself as a national power under coach Mike Krzyzewski in the mid-1980s, said his definition of blue blood mirrors that of the Supreme Court when it comes to obscenity.
“I can’t define it,” BIlas said, “but I know it when I see it.”
A blue blood, as far as Bilas is concerned, combines sustained high-level success with a tradition of championships. Bilas agreed with Johnson’s characterization of UCLA, Kentucky, North Carolina, Kansas and Duke as no-brainers but added UConn as a top-five school based on the Huskies’ recent run that has six championships since 1999 and back-to-back titles the last two seasons under coach Danny Hurley.
“Nobody’s been better than UConn the last 25 years,” said Bilas, now a veteran analyst for ESPN.
Part of the fun in discussions of who qualifies as a blue blood is that there’s rarely consensus.
Bilas said he considered Michigan State, which won titles in 1979 and 2000 and has made eight additional Final Four appearances, a blue blood but understood not everyone agreed — including Spartans coach Tom Izzo.
Read more: There’s no I in banner: Restocked with talent, UCLA puts egos aside in title quest
“Oddly enough,” Bilas said, “Izzo would say no and I used to argue with him and say, ‘No, you’re a blue blood’ and he’d be like, ‘Nah, I’m not sure we’ve achieved that.’ ”
UCLA remains firmly entrenched as a blue blood despite its recent lack of titles, Bilas said, because of its three consecutive Final Fours under coach Ben Howland from 2006-08 and another appearance under coach Mick Cronin in 2021.
“It’s kind of hard to go against UCLA winning 10 out of 12 and they’re not a blue blood,” Bilas said. “Now, even though UCLA hasn’t really sustained the same sort of dominance, they haven’t fallen off a cliff, either. It’s just when your standard is to win 10 out of 12, nothing looks quite as good. So UCLA is in there and they’re probably top five.”
One of the biggest questions in parsing blue bloods is where is the cutoff line? Do schools like Louisville and Villanova, with multiple championships, belong? What about Syracuse, which won just one title but enjoyed a decades-long run of success under coach Jim Boeheim?
“To me,” Bilas said, “blue blood is more of a feeling than a recognized moniker that we hand out like, ‘OK, here are our blue bloods’ and ‘Hey, you’re almost a blue blood, another few years and you’ll get in.’ There’s no arbiter for that, but it’s an interesting barroom question.”
Cronin said he considered a blue blood to be defined by the public’s perception of who’s supposed to be good, listing the New York Yankees, Dallas Cowboys and Dodgers based on their success when most adults were growing up.
“These teams are historically good teams and have won titles and competed at a high level, so there’s a connotation with a certain program whether it’s college football or basketball, whether it’s the NBA or whatever,” Cronin said. “Who are the blue bloods in the NBA? You would say [Boston] Celtics, Lakers. And then really, that stems from the ‘80s, but we would say that because that’s what we all [knew as children.]”
But perception can differ from reality, Cronin said, given downturns by those same teams. UCLA and North Carolina are trying to rebound from recent struggles — the Bruins posted a losing record last season and the Tar Heels failed to make the NCAA tournament two years ago. Both have learned that being considered a blue blood doesn’t put extra points on the scoreboard.
Along those lines, Cronin said, he’d rather be a big boy — a team with the most money — than a blue blood.
“All you’ve got to do is look at who’s getting what recruits,” Cronin said. “Look, you’re talking about certain kids, they’re going to the highest bidder now — 90% of these kids in basketball and football. I’d rather be a big boy than a blue blood in this era because the big boy’s got the advantage.”
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
