Big Ben was a small fish when he got away

Ouch.

UCLA Coach Ben Howland is taking the Bruins to the Final Four for the third year in a row. Yet there was a time when he couldn't get a head coaching job in Southern California.

Couldn't. Get. A. Job.

It seems almost unfair to criticize an athletic director who didn't hire him, because, well, there are so many of them. How do you single out one?

How could Loyola Marymount, UC Irvine (twice) and UC Santa Barbara not hire a coach who, let's be frank, could end up in the Hall of Fame?

"What a fool I was," former Loyola Marymount athletic director Brian Quinn said, laughing.

"Big mistake, big mistake, and I know that," said Quinn, now the athletic director at Cal State Fullerton. "But honestly, how long would he have lasted at LMU? A couple of years and someone much bigger would have grabbed him."

That was back in 1992, when Howland, now 50, was a young UC Santa Barbara assistant, the same hard-driving coach he is today, and maybe a little on the brash side.

Quinn chose John Olive, a Villanova assistant.

"John Olive looked like a perfect fit for LMU," Quinn said. "He was from a Catholic university. He had a law degree. He seemed like the right guy and Rollie Massimino was enormously high on him."

Olive lasted five years, going 7-21 his final season.

Howland had missed out on the Irvine job in 1991 too.

"He was an assistant at UCSB and he called and said, 'Tom, I'm your guy,' or something to that effect," said Tom Ford, the Irvine athletic director at the time who is now associate AD for external relations at Cal State Northridge. "The tone of it was, 'You don't need to look any further. I'm here.'

"I explained that we needed someone who had been a head coach at some level. We had in our criteria that you had to have been a head coach. That eliminated Ben."

It was probably good for Howland's career.

Irvine hired Seton Hall assistant Rod Baker, who was gone after five years, with a 1-25 record his final season.

Even Dan Guerrero, the UCLA athletic director who hired Howland from Pittsburgh in 2003, didn't hire him the first time he had a chance.

Guerrero was the Irvine AD in 1997, by which time Howland had gotten his first college job, at Northern Arizona. Guerrero chose Pat Douglass, who has won more games than any coach in Irvine history but has yet to take the Anteaters to the NCAA tournament.