There are only a handful of schools that have good enough football and basketball teams to be ranked in the top 10 in the same week.
UCLA is one of those very elite universities that, in the last 25 years, has had both its football and basketball teams ranked in both AP Top 25 Polls simultaneoulsy. So far this school year, it’s done it three times. This week UCLA is ranked 9th in football and 8th in basketball.
We’re using the Associated Press Poll, since it’s the most historical. In football, the AP poll first appeared in 1934 and then regularly from 1936. The organization started ranking college basketball teams in 1948 and continuously since 1950.
You’d think it would be a pretty common occurence for UCLA since it’s a school that’s traditionally good in both football and basketball. But, surprisingly, it really isn’t. There are only a handful of UCLA seasons that had both teams ranked in the top ten simultaneously. There were some other years that came very close — with top 20-ish rankings in one sport and top ten in the other, or top 2o in both. There were many years when either football or basketball was ranked top ten — but it was during a period when the other sport wasn’t faring well. In the last 50 years or so, you’d also think, for UCLA, this would be lopsided toward basketball, that most of the time it was basketball that had the top-ten ranking only to not be matched by a top-ten football ranking. But during the 1980s, UCLA football was king of campus and UCLA basketball, well, wasn’t. When UCLA was racking up top-ten rankings in football during the heyday of the Terry Donahue era and then the beginning of the Bob Toledo era, UCLA basketball was struggling through the Larry Farmer and Walk Hazzard tenures in basketball. During the Jim Mora era (2012-2017), UCLA was ranked in the top ten six times, but that coincided with the downside of the Ben Howland era and the beginning of Steve Alford’s time at UCLA; Mora was then starting to slide when Alford had his only season at UCLA that garnered top ten rankings, the Lonzo Ball season of 2016-2017.
The last time UCLA was ranked top ten in both football and basketball in the same week was in 1998, when Toledo was football coach and Steve Lavin was basketball coach. That year it was ranked top ten for most of the entire football season, all the way through to the end of the season. It overlapped with UCLA basketball being ranked top ten for three weeks to start the basketball season and then for a week at the end of December and another week at the beginning of January.
It achieved it also in 1997, when Toledo’s football program made top ten status in mid-November and then at the end of the season for a couple of weeks. Lavin’s 1997-1998 basketball squad started the season in November ranked in the top ten and then reattained it in late December, overlapping for three weeks of rankings with Toledo’s Bruins.
If you’re looking for the best combined week in the last 25 years, it was either Nov. 24th, 1997, when UCLA was ranked 6th in football and 7th in basketball, or Nov. 23rd, 1998, when UCLA was ranked 3rd in football and 10th in basketball. It’s something to at least keep in mind in 2022 when UCLA is currently 9th in football and 8th in basketball.
Now, if we look for other times beyond the last 25 years when UCLA was ranked top ten in football and basketball in the same week, it would have been pretty common during the 1960s when John Wooden was winning national championships in basketball and Tommy Prothro was running one of the elite football programs in the country. It also would have been a common occurence during the ’70s when UCLA basketball was still in its post-Wooden glow in terms of rankings, and Terry Donahue was starting to get his top-ten groove on. What kept it from happening back then, though, was that the football season, if UCLA didn’t go to the Rose Bowl, ended in late November, and the basketball season didn’t start until early December. Take 1969-70. Prothro’s Bruins finished the season 8-1-1 and 10th in the AP Poll, but it lost to USC on the last game of the season Nov. 22nd, so it didn’t play in the Rose Bowl — and back then second-place Pac-8 teams didn’t play in other bowl games. On the basketball side, Wooden’s Bruins started the season ranked 4th — but the season didn’t start until Dec. 1st, so there was no overlap of seasons, and thus, rankings. There is a record of the basketball “preseason” ranking, and UCLA was ranked No. 4, but there’s no date when the preseason ranking was released. There is a record of the AP football poll being updated Dec. 8th (UCLA was 10th) and UCLA basketball had moved to No. 2 by then, but without UCLA football actually playing a game that week because the season is over, do we count it? There were plenty of years like this when Wooden’s UCLA teams were, of course, a staple in the top ten and, to his credit, Prothro’s teams were also: 1969, 1967, 1966, and 1965.
Now, in 1974, the Tournament of Roses agreed to allow Pac-8 teams that didn’t play in the Rose Bowl to play in other bowl games. So, in the 1976 football season, UCLA was ranked in the top ten through its Liberty Bowl appearance against Alabama on Dec. 20th, so with Gene Bartow’s 1976-1977 hoops team starting the season in the top ten, there was a three-week overlap of UCLA being ranked top ten in both football and basketball. In 1982-83, which is one of the best years in UCLA athletics history (and my senior season at UCLA), UCLA football was ranked No. 11 when it defeated No. 15-ranked USC in late November, and then moved up to No. 5 in the country. It spent all of December ranked No. 5 before it beat Michigan in the Rose Bowl Jan. 1st, 1983, and finished the season ranked No. 5. In basketball, under coach Larry Farmer, UCLA started the season ranked No. 7 in late November and by Jan. 1st had moved up to as high as No. 3. That amounts to six week of both teams simultaneously in the top 10.
In the last four years or so, only a handful of schools can say they’ve achieved top-ten status in football and basketball simultaneously:
Michigan, Alabama, Wisconsin, Florida, Ohio State, Oregon, and Auburn. Oregon, actually, did it the most, followed by Michigan and Ohio State.
What years did UCLA finish in the top ten in both basketball and football? That is, the two sports weren’t necessarily ranked in the top ten simultaneously in the same week but both finished its seasons, respectively, in the top ten. It’s only happened six times in UCLA’s history:
1982-83: Football (Donahue) 5th; Basketball (Farmer) 7th
1975-76: Football (Dick Vermeil) 5th; Basketball (Bartow) 2nd
1973-74: Football (Pepper Rodgers) 9th; Basketball (Wooden) 1st
1969-70: Football (Prothro) 10th; Basketball (Wooden) 1st
1967-68: Football (Prothro) 10th; Basketball (Wooden) 2nd
1966-67: Football (Prothro) 5th; Basketball (Wooden) 1st
If you want to create a critera of real super-elite status, how about schools with top-ten ranked football and basketball programs combined with top-20 status in the U.S. News national university rankings in the last few years?
That would be just UCLA (Michigan is ranked 25th in U.S. News).
So, appreciate it, Bruin fans. Appreciate the season you’re experiencing. It’s the first time in 24 years UCLA has had top-ten rankings in football and basketball in the same week. As history indicates, while we tend to think this is the kind of success that should be pretty common place for UCLA, it’s pretty rare.
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