You should have seen the looks on my colleagues’ faces with around 15 minutes to play last night in UCLA’s overtime loss to Cal.

There were looks of pure amazement, a little confusion, even a little smugness.

Finally, surprisingly, shockingly, UCLA switched into a zone defense. It’s been a long time coming.

Despite constant questioning from the media about even testing a zone defense, UCLA head coach Ben Howland had been so steadfast in his opinion that, quite frankly, I never expected it.

Coach, will you use the zone?
“No.”

Would you consider it?
“No.”

Why not?
“We play man-to-man.”

Do you ever practice it?
“Only when the other team uses it.”

So when it happened, suffice to say, we were all blown away. So too, it appears, were the players.

“It caught me by surprise, to tell you the truth,” Joshua Smith said. “I remember going in the huddle and he said we were going to run zone and I was kind of like “Oh, OK.”

The response among the players was universally positive, and though Howland said he would not use the defense for the rest of the season, you have to think he’ll reconsider.

“It was good. It slowed them down. They had a good game plan and the zone kind of threw them off a little bit. That’s really the first time we did it all season. Coach made a good adjustment and maybe if another team is hitting all their shots on us, we’ll see it again.” – Reeves Nelson

“I felt like we should’ve played zone against a couple teams. We’re long enough and athletic enough to do that. Showing teams different looks is going to confuse them.” – Tyler Honeycutt

“The zone stopped the bleeding a lot. Although they were scoring in the zone, it was more like one out of three times, as opposed to scoring every time against the man. Zone is the reason we got back in the game.” – Malcolm Lee

At this point, we all know Howland is who Howland is. But maybe he’s learned that with this team’s deficiencies, he’ll need to bend a bit.