Matter of Fact: Sean Miller’s jab at UCLA only highlights his own frustration

Sean Miller’s 2016 recruiting class has a combined height of 6 feet, 11 inches, a statistic that would be more interesting if it was a result of the Arizona coach losing his mind and committing wholeheartedly to playing small ball.

But he hasn’t. Well, at least not the small ball part – Miller won’t be trotting out a backcourt of three-foot recruits any time soon.

He may have lost his mind, though. How else can you explain the recruiting master being thoroughly outworked by UCLA’s oft-maligned Steve Alford?

See, all 83 of those inches belong to one player, four-star Finnish center Lauri Markkanen, a troubling reality for Miller at a point in the year when most schools have filled out classes with three or four recruits.

During the summer, Miller looked poised to land a premier group, with five-star power forward T.J. Leaf already committed and five-star wing Josh Jackson leaning toward the Wildcats. But Jackson looks more and more likely to choose Michigan State, and Leaf decommitted from Arizona in August.

His recruitment re-opened, Leaf waited three months before announcing on ESPNU Thursday that he would attend UCLA.

The frustration was evident at Miller’s Monday night press conference when Miller not-so-subtly lashed out at the school that stole the prize of his recruiting class. After thanking the Wildcat fans for packing the 14,000-seat McKale Center, Miller commented on the poor attendance at other schools’ games the night before.

With a quick reference to the notorious L.A. traffic, the 2014 Pac-12 Coach of the Year made it clear who he was targeting.

“I watched a couple of games last night like, ‘Wow, that is amazing, who’s not at the game?” Miller said. “I know there’s a lot of traffic. But you wonder if the season ticket was not printed the right way.”

Miller is right, the Sunday crowd at Pauley Pavilion was dejecting. Just 6,595 fans watched – rather tamely, I might add – as UCLA defeated Cal Poly, 88-83.

“As a young kid, why would you ever want to come to a program or a place where nobody comes to the game? I mean, that puts a lot of pressure on their recruiting,” Miller said. “For us, you come here, you have an opportunity to play in front of 14,500. You’ve got that pregame introduction. You have the ZonaZoo. It feels like college basketball.”

Surely, Miller meant all this as a snipe at the Bruins.

But the diatribe would have been more poignant if Alford wasn’t set to add an elite group of recruits this year – Leaf, five-star point guard Lonzo Ball, four-star center Ike Anigbogu and three-star forward Kobe Paras.

The critique, while accurate, just doesn’t work in Miller’s favor. He has lost out to Alford in attracting prospects this year, and his response is to say he enjoys a major recruiting advantage over the UCLA coach.

It’s the opposite of an excuse, like Dennis Eckersley reminding everyone that Kirk Gibson was injured in the 1988 World Series, or Michigan pointing out that Appalachian State has much less funding for its football program.

Big crowds are a great recruiting tool. But they won’t do the job themselves. Sean Miller might have the metal detector, but Steve Alford has the treasure.

He has recruits.

Plural.