Mick Cronin believes home crowd advantage in college basketball is 'vastly overrated'

The UCLA Bruins and head coach Mick Cronin got a close win over the Arizona Wildcats on Saturday. That came despite moving the game from the McKale Center in Tuscon to the Footprint Center in Phoenix, home of the NBA’s Phoenix Suns, which has a larger capacity.

Despite the move, Cronin didn’t feel that his team was overly bothered by it and when he was asked about the move after the game he was dismissive about the impact that a college basketball crowd actually has on the outcome of the game.

“I thought their crowd was great,” Mick Cronin said. “Restaurants are better here [in Phoenix].”

Mick Cronin was then asked if there was any real difference in the crowd from one venue to another. However, at that point, he was dismissive about the actual impact that road environments have, calling it overrated.

“No, no,” Cronin explained. “We could care less. Really, we won at Oregon last week. I think that stuff is vastly overrated.”

This season, UCLA is 9-1 and the vast majority of those games have come at home, where the Bruins are now 7-0. They’ve only played one true road game, which the Bruins won. On top of that, they’re 1-1 this season in neutral site games. That game against Arizona was considered a neutral site game.

The game between Arizona and UCLA was a defensive battle with the Bruins winning 57-54. Tyler Bilodeau led the way scoring for the Bruins with 17 points. He also had three rebounds and an assist. That came in 33 minutes of action.

Late in the game, UCLA looked like they were about to be upset by Arizona. However, the Bruins were able to bear down late in the game. Despite trailing by double digits with less than 10 minutes to play, UCLA was able to go on a 19-5 run to pull out a close win. For the last 8:46 of the game, UCLA was able to lean on its defense and keep Arizona from scoring a field goal.

“Obviously, it was not a thing of beauty for either one of us,” Cronin added. “We persevered in the end, Skyy [Clark] made a great play on the offensive rebound and was smart enough to dribble it out. He was probably our smartest player. I was happy for him, obviously, he had a big game today. Not a thing of beauty, we kept fouling, but our defense was able to start creating some turnovers, that was the difference in the game. And Tyler Bilodeau, obviously, had a good one.”

UCLA will now return home to take on Prairie View A&M. The Bruins’ next true road game is going to be on January 4th when UCLA travels to Lincoln to take on the Nebraska Cornhuskers.