DePaul athletic director Bill Bradshaw had just spent 2 1/2 painful hours at courtside watching UCLA yawn its way to a 94-88 victory at Allstate Arena. So thoroughly outplayed and outcoached were the Blue Demons that angry fans began yelling, "How much for Pitino?" Later, a banner would make its way down to the student section near the baseline, home of beer and every other four-letter word you can imagine. Read the banner: "With this talent, Joey would be 22-0!"

That would be Joey Meyer, who was canned by Bradshaw nearly four seasons ago to make room for the supposed DePaul basketball renaissance.

Photo: AP/Paul Sakuma

So afterward Bradshaw walked to the arena press room, where he waited quietly against a cinderblock wall for the beleaguered coach to finish his postgame comments to reporters. There were questions about another week spent unranked in the polls, about the constant controversies and pressures, about an ankle injury suffered by one of the starters. Then the coach stepped off the small stage and found Bradshaw waiting for him with an outstretched hand and a few kind words.

"Hang in there," said Bradshaw.

"Thank you," said UCLA coach Steve Lavin.

This is life as Lavin knows it, a through-the-looking-glass existence that finds him the recipient of mournful looks and grave handshakes after winning 11 of his last 13 games, including victories against No. 1 Stanford at Palo Alto, No. 22 USC on the Trojans' home court, and previously ranked DePaul on the road -- all in an eight-day span. Only at UCLA can you go 11-2 and still wonder if they'll change the locks on the office door.

Lavin is busy accepting condolences these days because his own athletic director -- the monumentally clumsy Pete Dalis -- contacted Rick Pitino when the Bruins were busy losing to the likes of Cal State Northridge. As if that weren't bad enough, Dalis then lied to Lavin about the conversation (hmmm ... lying -- isn't that what cost Jim Harrick his job?) before finally coming clean with the media not long ago. Needless to say, Dalis won't be the keynote speaker at any upcoming management seminars.

As usual, Lavin handled the mess much the same way he has handled everything during his strange five-season stay at UCLA -- with a smile meant to hide the hurt, with a well-practiced schtick of one-liners, with a shrug of the shoulders. And as usual, Lavin recites a handful of his favorite John Wooden-isms, beginning with, "Make each day your masterpiece." Translation: Lavin can't change yesterday, can't predict tomorrow, but can control today.

So the 36-year-old Lavin, who looks as if his head was used as a dipstick, does what he can, which is work his ass off and confound his critics. And thanks to Dalis' regrettable call to Pitino, Lavin now gets the benefit of sympathy in some circles.

Nobody will mistake him for James Naismith, but Lavin might have finally earned the respect he craves, the respect some of his peers have refused to give him. His Bruins are 15-6, own a boffo RPI and have an uncanny ability to recover from assorted disasters. They lose to North Carolina, but win at Purdue. They lose by 25 at Arizona, but beat Oregon State by 27. They get humiliated at Cal and then upset Stanford for the second consecutive season. Somebody had to devise those game plans for this mostly star-less team (Jason Kapono being the exception). That somebody is Lavin, whose decision to run a press since the second half of the Carolina game has turned out to be a nice bit of X and O work.

Lavin can sometimes sound as slick as his hair, but beneath the defense-mechanism wisecracks is a vulnerable, regular kind of guy who deserves better than the second, third, and fourth guessing he gets in Westwood. At the very least, he deserves a very public acknowledgement from Dalis that the AD screwed the pooch on the Pitino thing. And Lavin deserves more than a vote of confidence. He deserves a show of confidence. There's a difference.

UCLA is the Notre Dame of college basketball, with a margin of error as thin as dental floss. By Lavin's own admission you have to win and win big. You have to fill seats. You have to keep the big-money boosters happy. You have to keep the aura alive. "It is what it is, so you don't complain about it," he says.

But the guy can read a UCLA media guide. He can turn to pages 169-173 and see that the average tenure for a Bruins coach in the post-Wooden era is a little more than three years. "A faster rate than Dominos delivers pizza," Lavin says. And nobody knows better than Lavin how quickly the UCLA "faithful" can turn on a coach. After all, these are some of the same people who once chided Wooden for not winning an eighth consecutive national championship, who criticized Harrick less than a year removed from the 1994-95 Final Four title. They have the patience of infants.

There is still time for a Bruins collapse. UCLA faces Arizona at Pauley Pavilion Thursday. A trip to Oregon awaits. Cal visits on March 1. Stanford arrives two days later. And you never know what the Bruins will do in the NCAA Tournament: reach the Sweet 16, as they did last season ... or get beat by Detroit Mercy in the opening round, as they did a year earlier.

But no matter what happens, Lavin deserves something he hasn't received since he got the job in 1996. It's called the benefit of the doubt.

Gene Wojciechowski is a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine. E-mail him at gene.wojciechowski@espnmag.com.