U ... C ... L ... Hey, over here!

Well. I guess there's only one option left now, borderline blasphemous though it might be.

Time to call the good Lord and ask if he can send John Wooden back down for awhile. 

(The good Lord's imagined answer: "No way! We've got a chance to go all the way next year!")

In any event, Coach Wooden surely wouldn't turn down the UCLA job, on account of he made the UCLA job what it is. Ten national titles, including seven in a row, will do that for a basketball program. In fact, it will do it so much a lot of folks in Westwood still think only Coach Wooden is deserving of sitting first chair in Pauley Pavilion, even though Coach went to join his Lord and his beloved wife Nell nine years ago.

Which of course is a big chunk of the problem here.

Since UCLA showed Steve Alford the road on New Year's Eve, it's had no luck finding anyone willing to take on both the job and the delusional expectations that come with it. UCLA has gone from perennial national power to intermittent national power to still-pretty-good-but-nothing-special, and now comes the greatest indignity.

Suddenly no one wants to go there.

Once the Zion Williamson of coaching jobs, it's become the 5-9 kid in Coke-bottle glasses sitting on the end of the bench, begging Coach to put him in the game.

Rick Barnes, the Naismith Coach of the Year, became the latest coach to turn down UCLA, even though UCLA was offering $5 million a year plus bonuses and incentives. Think about that: Barnes turned down UCLA, and $5 mill, to stay at Tennessee. He turned down the legacy of Wooden and Kareem and Bill Walton and all those titles to stay at a place where the basketball legacy pretty much begins and ends with Ernie Grunfeld and Bernard King. A place where the real basketball legacy rests with Pat Summitt and the women's program.

So who does UCLA go after next?

You figure eventually it will find someone, but this is the second time in a row it's found the selling job embarrassingly difficult. Alford, while a successful coach, did not exactly bring the sort of resume to town that UCLA might once have commanded. And now?

Well, I don't know who else will throw his hat in the ring, but let me put this out there: The Blob is available. UCLA could probably get me for $3 mill tops, so I'm a bargain. Of course, I have zero coaching experience, but I did once spend 90 minutes one-on-one with Coach Wooden.

That should be enough, right?

Know what else?

Sadly, I'm barely joking.