While there is no official word from the school or the athletic department sources are saying last night that UCLA and Steve Alford have agreed on terms for a buyout. If true, the search for a new UCLA basketball coach will be in earnest.

The UCLA basketball program has been searching since 1975 to find a coach who can bring the UCLA program back to the prominence it once had during its glory days of John Wooden.

It is unrealistic in today’s era of college basketball to think that any school can have the kind of success that Wooden, but it is realistic to believe UCLA can bring in a coach that can have and will win more than the one national championship this program has won since the departure of Wooden.

That is correct the school that holds the record for the most national championships; the second most final four appearances have had a scant one national championship since the Wooden era ended in 1975.

The writing was clear as day that a change had to be made after UCLA’s disappointing loss to Liberty Saturday and the fourth straight setback for the Bruins when asked by a member in the how things can be corrected by conference play which starts on Thursday (Jan. 3) against Stanford.

Alford answered the question this way:

“When you talk about pass, shoot, dribble, catch, I don’t know. I guess we’ll have to watch the tape and see exactly where those issues are,” Alford said. “How we dribble, how we pass, how we catch.

“It’s 7th-grade stuff, but we have to go back to some drills I used to do as a player in middle school. It’s frustrating the turnovers that we have. If they’re aggressive charging fouls, those type of things - I don’t mind dead ball aggressive turnovers. But the live ball turnover that we had are inexcusable. They just are, and they shouldn’t be happening. And that’s where my disappointment is.

“I don’t think that’s going to change when I watch the tape. It’s hard to run an offense when 24 times you have the ball, and you don’t get a shot on goal. That’s hard to beat anybody. We have to try to figure it out from an offensive standpoint.”

An announcement is expected today Dec. 31, 2018.