Bill Walton is possibly the greatest Pac-12 basketball player of all time

Younger sports fans know Bill Walton as that crazy commentator on television, a guy who never failed to go off on a tangent and say something colorful and weird. Walton was loved by many, but for others, his offbeat style as a television analyst was …

Younger sports fans know Bill Walton as that crazy commentator on television, a guy who never failed to go off on a tangent and say something colorful and weird. Walton was loved by many, but for others, his offbeat style as a television analyst was off-putting. Sports fans who grew up in the 21st century knew Walton as a wacky persona who always promoted the Pac-12 as the Conference of Champions. For older fans — and for anyone who appreciated Walton as an athlete and not a personality — the former UCLA Bruin was a giant. If we are talking about the greatest college basketball players of all time — strictly based on what they did in college — Walton is on the short list. Walton died on Monday at the age of 71. Many will discuss his television career, but in this remembrance, we look back at his college playing career and where he stands in Pac-12 and national college basketball history.

In the 1973 title game against Memphis State, Bill Walton hit 21 of 22 shots. It is simply one of the greatest championship game performances in any sport.
Walton was the best player in college basketball in multiple seasons. That alone puts him in very select company
Under Walton, UCLA won 88 straight games. Bill Walton’s UCLA teams were among the best to ever play the game.
Bill Russell won back-to-back NCAA national championships. Lew Alcindor (before he changed his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) won back-to-back titles. Bill Walton did, too, in 1972 and 1973. He is part of that elite group of back-to-back champions.
The 1974 Final Four loss to North Carolina State was easily the most painful moment of Walton’s UCLA career, but if the Bruins had not blown a late lead in that game (which went into double overtime), they might have won eight straight national titles, maybe even nine given that they won in 1975 (without Walton). The fact that UCLA came so close in 1974 makes it hard to ignore how much Walton achieved. Walton would probably be viewed as the clear-cut No. 1 college basketball player of all time if UCLA had finished the job in 1974.
The greatest men’s college basketball player of all time and the greatest Pac-12 men’s college basketball player of all time is — for most analysts and historians — the same person. Lew Alcindor won the three straight championships neither Walton nor Russell attained. Christian Laettner of Duke won two, but not three. It’s probably the correct assessment to put Alcindor over Walton, but the bigger reality is that the comparison is a close call. If you wanted to say Bill Walton was the very best men’s college basketball player of all time, you could make a credible argument.