Cal Ties School Record for Losses as No. 4 UCLA Crushes Bears

No. 4 UCLA moved a little closer to its first Pac-12 title in 10 years and Cal moved a little closer to its worst season in history as the Bruins clobbered Cal 78-43 on Saturday night at sold-out Pauley Pavilion in Los Angeles.

Cal (3-24, 2-14 Pac-12) shot just 22% from the field Saturday and matched a season low in points scored. The Bears have lost 11 straight games overall and have dropped 11 games in a row to UCLA (23-4, 14-2 Pac-12).

"We were very concerned whether we could score the ball against their defense coming into the game, and that concern proved to be valid," Cal coach Mark Fox said.

The Bears' 24th defeat tied the school record for losses in a season, matching the 2017-18 season when Cal finished 8-24. Cal has at least five games left, including a first-round Pac-12 tournament game, and unless the Bears win the rest of their games and win the NCAA tournament, they will break the program record for defeats in a season.

Also, Cal is in danger of recording an alltime low in victories. The Bears have won at least six games every season since 1913-14, when they played just two games (and won both).

The Bears lost their two games in L.A. to USC and UCLA by a combined margin of 72 points.

Jaime Jaquez had 20 points and eight rebounds in 26 minutes for UCLA, which is two games ahead of Arizona in the loss column with four regular-season games left as the Bruins seek their first conference title since 2013. The Bruins also are in the running for a No. 1 seed in the NCAA tournament, and there is an outside chance they will be ranked first or second in the country when the next AP poll is released Monday.

The Bruins shot 51.7% from the floor Saturday and won their 23rd consecutive home game, the longest active streak in Division I basketball. Cal will play at Pauley Pavilion just one more time, when the Bears face the Bruins in Westwood next season. That is unless the teams arrange a nonconference game against each other after UCLA moves to the Big Ten in the summer of 2024.

Cal again was without DeJuan Clayton, who was inactive because of illness, leaving the Bears with no active players averaging better than 10 points per game.

And the Bears' offensive shortcoming were evident from the start. They went scoreless for the first six minutes of the game, falling behind 12-0. They scored just 15 points in the first half when they shot 18.5% from the field (5-for-27). That helped UCLA take a 23-point lead (38-15) at halftime, and by that time Jaquez had 13 points, just two fewer than the Cal team.

Fox said the environment at the sold-out 12,829-seat arena may have been a much for the Cal team at the outset. He also said Monty Bowser (two points on 0-4 shooting) has had to make a difficult adjustment from being a complementary player to one who has to score and handle the ball quite a bit because of injuries to the Bears' backcourt players. He suggests that freshman Grant Newell (nine points, 2-for-11 shooting) may have hit a wall.

But the biggest issue was UCLA's defense, which began the weekend leading the Pac-12 in scoring defense and improved upon that Saturday.

"Their [defensive] recovery time is elite. Their ability to switch is elite, and their ability to rim-protect is elite," Fox said. "Defensively they have been terrific really for the last couple years, and now they're experienced with it."

Less than nine minutes into the second half, UCLA had built a 37-point lead.

Kuany Kuany led Cal in scoring with 14 points, and Joel Brown had 10. Besides Jaquez's 20 points, freshman Amari Bailey had 16 points for UCLA and Jaylen Clark added 13. UCLA had 19 assists to four for Cal, and the Bruins outscored Cal 44-16 in points in the paint.

Cover photo of Joel Brown by Richard Mackson, USA TODAY Sports

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