UCLA's basketball season was plummeting. The team was splintering. And no one knew how to fix it.
It was the last weekend in February and the Bruins had just been defeated by Stanford, one of many frustrating losses in a rare UCLA season full of them.
For weeks, some Bruins thought teammates were following different agendas. Finally, concerns were voiced in an unusually lengthy postgame session.
"It might have been the first time we brought it out in the open," point guard Bryce Alford said last week, after UCLA was routed by USC in the first round of the Pac-12 Conference tournament.