As goes UCLA basketball, so goes Pac-12 basketball. That's how some of the nation sees this conference, built on the Bruins' championship banners and legendary place in the game.

If that's the case, then the league is peopled by miscreant players drinking regularly during the season, sometimes doing drugs before practice, bullying teammates to the extent of injuring them — all while coaches are looking the other way.

Fortunately, that's not the real picture in the league. But according to a sizzling piece in Sports Illustrated this week by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer George Dohrmann, that's what has brought the Bruins down from three-time Final Four participant (2006-08) under Ben Howland to just five guys wearing short pants.

For Howland, the good news is that there's nothing in the story implying NCAA violations. The bad news is that athletic director Dan Guerrero, on a Wednesday conference call, came up well short of guaranteeing Howland would be back next season.

Guerrero did call the saga "a bump in the road," and he expressed optimism that a program that had "slid" could get its mojo back. But, addressing Howland's future, said, "We've just read the article today. There are some issues evident in there that have to be discussed. We're talking less than 12 hours from the release of that article. We still have some due diligence to do in that regard. I don't want to get out in front of anything."

The story depicts a culture at UCLA that began slipping after some of the stars of Howland's glory years there — Jordan Farmar, Arron Afflalo, Russell Westbrook — were gone. In came two touted recruiting classes without the work ethic or discipline to carry on the tradition.

It says three players — one of them Jerime Anderson, scheduled to play Thursday night against Washington State — regularly drank and sometimes smoked dope before practice; that three players attended a New Year's Eve "rave" and dropped Ecstasy there; and that bad-boy Reeves Nelson — an All-Pac-10 player in 2011 — became a bully, targeting players in practice and causing injuries that prompted players to transfer.

Howland is alleged to have looked the other way at Nelson's behavior until this season, when he finally suspended and then booted him.

The story says one of the players Nelson injured was Bellevue product Alex Schrempf, who suffered a back injury when fouled on a breakaway. It also paints Howland as going easy on Kentwood product Josh Smith.

Said Howland on a conference call, "Some of the instances I had no knowledge about, some were taken out of context, and some were not true."

Howland is portrayed as distant, even alienated from his players, a charge he says he finds "hurtful."

In the wake of the story, I heard two dissenting voices. One questioned the lack of names attached to sources. That's true, but Dohrmann says he talked to "more than a dozen" former players and staff members from a four-year period, which is a pretty finite group.

Second, it's said that what was described at UCLA could be found at any high-major school that's losing right now. But the point is, what's happened there is what's caused the Bruins to be ordinary.

And in the big picture, it's UCLA, the most golden name in college basketball. No place — not Duke, not Kentucky, not Indiana — has quite the same resonance.

As for Howland, when's the last time you recall a recognized, big-name proven coach (at more than one stop) fall victim to such an abrupt failure of culture in his program?

A few weeks ago, on a conference call, I asked Howland if all the premature departures from the program had caused him to do any self-examination.

He went riffing on bad decisions by those who left early for the NBA. Like a lot of coaches, Howland is stubborn down to the marrow, unwilling to consider that he might have been part of the problem.

Now might be a good time to entertain that possibility.

Bud Withers: 206-464-8281 or bwithers@seattletimes.com