Kevin Love's "future" according to ESPN

An ESPN (sports network) group recently made predictions on which teams will fare best in the NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) basketball tournament being conducted this third week of March, 2008, in what has been called "March Madness." As winter begins to thaw, the most ardent of basketball fans become extremely animated. Although experts act with even-handed detachment, in their enthusiasm they can botch the arrangement of their verb tenses when more than one action occurs in one sentence. One such expert on an ESPN television broadcast boldly stated:

"If UCLA wins the NCAA championship, which I predicted they would, Kevin Love will be a big factor." Another way of saying the first part could be: "If UCLA will win the NCAA championship..." in which the verb is in the simple future tense. Either way, the expert was in safe verb territory until he came to the third clause.

The expert should have said: "If UCLA wins the NCAA championship, which I predicted they would, Kevin Love will have been a big factor."

First, Kevin Love proved out as a "big factor" in the prediction of UCLA's achievement, then, because of Love's predicted achievement, UCLA emerges the champion.

The action that occurs first is put in the future perfect (or future perfect passive as is here the case).

"sequence of tenses" indicates "the logical relationship of time as expressed by tense to other words, especially to other verbs, in an expression. (Harper's English Grammar). Another way of looking at tense sequence is to understand the relationship of two clauses working with one another to establish some relationship in a sequence of time: "The dependence of the tense of a subordinate verb on the tense of the verb in the main clause." (The Concise Oxford Dictionary). The main clause states that UCLA wins (will win) "depending upon" Kevin Love first playing a large role in the rounds of the tournament leading up to and including the championship game.

Sequence counts both on the court and in grammatical syntax.