Thursday, August 28, 2008

Football begins

I don't know whether to look forward to the UCLA football season, which begins Saturday at 5 PDT against Tennessee on ESPN, with anticipation and trepidation. Things should certainly be different eventually with Rick Neuheisel as coach, but Ben Olsen, penciled in as starting quarterback, has already gone down with an injury (8-10 more weeks) and Kevin Craft, a transfer, is an unknown quantity. The offensive line, the heart of any good football team, is mostly new and untested. And quite frankly, there are valid doubts about the overall talent level on this team.

But despite problems at other schools where he has coached -- though the fact that he put a big bet into an NCAA basketball tournament pool while coaching football was pretty bogus as an ethical problem and I think he got a settlement from U. of Washington after they fired him over it -- he has been successful as a coach wherever he has gone, and he's an old (1984 Rose Bowl MVP, which makes him a youngster by my lights) Bruin player. I suspect there will be a certain amount of "wait until next year" this season, but I'm hoping against hope that it will be better than that.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

In the UK one of the most up and coming sports channels seem to be Setanta. I've recently subscribed to them after a lot of hype surrounding the new deals and packages that they have made available. Sky Sports in general don't seem to cover as much as they used to and don't seem to focus as much on football and other sports such as American Ice Hockey and Basketball.