USC 28, UCLA 14. At least I'm not ashamed

Well, as I rather suspected would happen, USC beat UCLA last night, but it was a more competitive game than the final score indicated and I wasn't ashamed of the effort. Indeed, if Jonathan Franklin hadn't fumbled shortly after a 59-yard touchdown run, the momentum would definitely have been with UCLA, and UCLA was within a play of tying the game as late as the fourth quarter. Also, the team didn't give up, scoring a meaningless touchdown (as far as the determining the winner of the game) but not necessarily meaningless when it comes to self-respect.

I want to believe Rick Neuheisel can turn things around, but the program definitely took a step backward this year. Yes, there were injuries, notably to Kevin Prince, who showed a few signs of competence before going down. I think Neuheisel is a reasonably good coach -- he certainly had success at Colorado and Washington. But you kinda wonder. He was accused of at least mildly shady recruiting practices at both schools (though what he was fired for at Washington , betting on March madness, had nothing to do with football) but has cleaned things up while serving at his alma mater. Could it be that his success before had more to do with possibly shady activities than coaching skills and now that he's following the straight-and-narrow his coaching deficiencies are being exposed? I don't know enough to have a definitive opinion, but it strikes me as a possibility.

The Bruins' bowl game

I suppose tonight's UCLA-USC game will be somewhat the equivalent of a bowl game for both teams -- USC because it's being disciplined by the NCAA over stuff from the Reggie Bush era and can't go to a bowl game this year, and UCLA because it doesn't have a good enough record to go to a bowl. Back in the day this game -- Beban, O.J., etc. -- was almost always unpredictable. Whatever the records, you knew it would be a hard-fought game and that the team with the poorer record always had a chance. In the current time frame UCLA has only beaten USC once in the last 12 years. so it would really be sweet to post a win this time.

This is a UCLA team that could go either way -- show up and battle hard, or lay down and die. The Register's Scott Reid gives the Bruins the edge in some categories -- linebacker, special teams, secondary, coaching, intangibles -- and predicts a 20-14 UCLA win. I hope he's right. I'll be wearing lots of blue and gold and watching closely in a few hours, atavistic partisan that I am.

There goes the season?

I was thinking about writing that the score was more lopsided than the actual game, but in fact that would be inaccurate. The halftime score of 7-7 reflected the game to that point, with UCLA scoring on the opening drive and the defense being fairly solid while the offense didn't get untracked again (or Washington's defense figured out how to stop the running game). The second half was a disaster, with Washington completely dominating. Locker wasn't all that spectacular but he was good enough. If anything, it's almost a surprise the score wasn't more lopsided than 24-7.

Of course it didn't help to have Brehaut knocked out of the game on virtually the first play from scrimmage of the second half. But it seemed as if the entire team fell apart. You might expect reserve quarterbacks without a minute of game-time experience to throw erratically and perhaps have interceptions. But the way to counter that should be with a running game that doesn't require the rookie to throw under pressure, and the offensive line didn't seem able to deliver the kind of blocking that should have made that possible.

Yes, it's theoretically possible to beat Arizona State and USC, but . . . Is it time to chalk this season up to injuries -- there is certainly some justification -- and give the rookies with little or no game experience some playing time with an eye toward next year?

Bruins just might win tonight

At least Register sportswriter Scott Reid seems to think so, giving the Bruins the edge in most categories and predicting a 34-17 UCLA win led by Jonathan Franklin and the ground game. I may be a little less certain. It is true that Washington, and especially Jake Locker, who almost went early to the NFL lat year, had been disappointing and inconsistent. And it's also true that UCLA seems to have regained a touch of momentum and Rick Neuheisel, even though he hasn't (yet) brought UCLA to the kind of glory we'd like to expect, has generally kept his UCLA teams improving as the season progresses.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to it, on ESPN at 5 PST. It's supposed to be cold and rainy in Washington, which I wouldn't think bodes well for a visitng team as a general rule, but might bode well for a visiting team with a solid running game. Am I expecting too little when I say I'll be content if they look respectable and as if they really came to play?

UCLA still rather inscrutable

UCLA has a bye week this week, so I probably won't write about them again until they frustrate me a little more. I thought this set of comments by the Register's sportswriter Adam Maya (whom I don't know even to recognize passing in the hall was rather insightful. Washington, Arizona and USC are still on the schedule, and if they win two of those games they will be bowl-eligible, which will be nice. The problem is they could win them all (yes, I think beating USC is not out of the question this year) or lose them all, depnending on which team shows up. Hanging in with and finally beating Oregon State was a good sign, and the offensive line may have geled. But this seems like a year for inconsistency.

Maya sees Richard Brehaut improving at QB (poor injured Kevin Prince), but wishes Norm Chow would give him more opportunities to pass when the run game isn't going all that well. I think he's got a point. Neuheisel last year was pretty good at getting the bruins to improve late in the season, so I haven't lost all hope -- or even very much.

Nice job, Bruins

Well, it didn't look easy, but the bruins finally pulled out a game, against Arizona State, that they should have won but easily could have lost. Nice to see Forbath, after missing a couple of field goals, make the deciding one at the end of the game. Still too many mistakes, but the offensive line does seem to be coming together. And Brehaut is showing potential especially as a runner. Maybe a decent year in the offing?

Those frustrating Bruins

Perhaps I should take it as a signal that UCLA is likely to be better and more competitive next year, especially if Richard Brehaut gets more playing time and experience. But the game against Arizona was more furstrating than encouraging. The score was only 29-12 and UCLA had several chances to take the game -- as well as two Arizona touchdowns that probably shouldn't have been except for sloppy tackling. The Bruins could beat any of their 4 remaining opponents, but I don't kbnow if they have the proper winning attitude. Last year the Bruins had a pretty respectable defense, and this year we have some good defensive players. But poor tackling and a somewhat sloppy attitude about technique will blow up the best defensive scheme.

Hope for the Bruins?

Well, Dallas Raines, Channel 7's weatherman, offered his prediction during the rain-in-the-morning weather report, that UCLA would beat Arizona 35-31. Not that I've ever seen him predict football games before, or that I have the slightest idea whether he has a track record or not, for a stubborn Bruin loyalist desperate for some shred of hope for a respectable season, that was enough. I also note that the Register sports writers (whom I know only enough to say hi when passing in the hall) are split 2-2 on this game. Arizona has been inconsistent also. Well, hope springs and all that. I now plan to watch the game with a degree of hope, perhaps even confidence.

Bruins in deep trouble

The Register sports guys zero in on some UCLA football problems coming up that those of us who are clear partisans might prefer to ignore but will find difficult. UCLA has to go 3-2 to be bowl-eligible and it is 3-7 against the teams remaining on the schedule during the Neuheisel era. The defense, which in previous years had at least sometimes been solid in previous years is eminently suspect even against weak teams like Washington State. Prince is out for the season, which might be a good thing for Brehaut's development, but he is still awfully green and prone to rookie mistakes. I'll continue to watch, but it may seem much more like a chore for loyalists than a pleasure or something undertaken with very much hope.

Hard to watch

I have to admit that it was tough to watch Oregon shellac the Bruins 60-13 (with the 13 only because UCLA scored a lat-minute meaningless touchdown -- well it was the first time oregon had been scored upon in the 4th quarter) last night. The sad thing was that considering Brehaut with little experience was starting in place of the injured Kevin Prince (who apparently will have arthroscopic surgery), the Bruins didn't play disastrously badly. But the vaunted UCLA defense stopped Oregon short of scoring only once all night. You're not going to win many that way.

Trying to remain modestly optimistic about the rest of the season, but it's not easy.

Go Bruins! I can still hope, can't I?

UCLA's game with Oregon starts in a few minutes and I don't know whether to be excited or resigned. The Bruins have shown, even this year, that they can stay with -- well, get ahead of at the outset and keep up the pressure -- and beat good teams. Even though Texas probably didn't belong in the Top 25 when UCLA played them, they were a good team. They have also shown that when a team getsd ahead of them in the first quarter it is difficult to impossible for the bruins to recover, and in the case of Stanford and Cal, it looked as if they just rolled over and prayed for the game to be over.

Oregon is not just a good team but a very good team. I am loyal enough to be able to hope for the best, -- and Neuheisel has had an extra few days following an embarrassing gsme to get the team ready. But I have some trepidation.

Can UCLA beat #1 Oregon?

Being back to work means being more in touch with the news, which means I actually figured out before last weekend that UCLA wasn't playing. It is playing Thursday -- against Oregon, which is undoubtedly the class of the Pac-10 this year and now rated as Number One in the country.

So is there a chance that the #1 team will be upset by an upstart for the third week in a row? It depends on which UCLA team shows up, the one that beat Houston and Texas or the one that rolled over and died against Cal? UCLA has been so inconsistent this year that I wouldn't be amazed if they beat Oregon and lost to Arizona State.

At any rate, I have all my jerseys and caps ready for Thursday night. I'm hoping for another miracle -- or at least a respectable performance.

Bruins look to be in trouble

A commenter noted that during the time I went dark here UCLA beat Texas and nicely dominated Washington State -- then looked like stumblebums against Cal. One consequence of going dark is that I can't point to any thing at the time to document that I had a pretty good feeling about the Texas game by Thursday of game week, Ah, well. Subsequent events seem to validate what I was afraid of: Texas didn't deserve to be ranked #7 and probably didn't belong in the Top 25; its early-season ranking was based more on last year's accomplishments than this year's team. So maybe beating them wasn't as big a deal as it seemed at the time, and maybe, just maybe, the Bruins aren't as good as we had hoped. The Cal game would seem to validate that.

I remain still something of a hopeless homer optimist. I'm hoping that the Cal and Stanford games were the anomalies this year -- maybe something about the psychological impact of Northern California this year or maybe climate change? OK, so that's perhaps a stretch. The loyalist in me wants to hope UCLA will show up Saturday with the kind of motivated team that beat Texas. Unfortunately there's something of a realist in there who thinks Oregon has so far shown itself to be the class of the Pac 10 and is likely to beat the Bruins pretty handily.

Ah, who wants to be a realist during football season?

UCLA back on track

I did watch the UCLA-Houston game Saturday and I was pleasantly surprised at the outcome, and especially at the energy the Bruins displayed. It looks as if Houston's record of being the nation's leading scoring team after two games was to at least some extent a function of playing pretty bad teams, but give the Bruins defense some credit as well. They're starting to round into shape, and the offensive line is playing surprisingly well too. I know UCLA recruits good athletes, and as I mentioned last week, Neuheisel UCLA teams have generally gotten better as the seas0n has gone on.

Maybe it's because this was the first game where he has been really healthy, but it looks to me as if we saw the Kevin Prince this week that the coaches must have been seeing in practice, at least a good bit of the time, or he wouldn't have won the starting position. Still room for improvement, but for the first time this year I have pretty good confidence that he's capable of improvement.

Of course Texas will be a tough test this week, but at least I have pretty good confidence that the Bruins will give a good account of themselves.

A glimmer of hope?

During my illness and convalescence time at home I haven't even been reading an entire newspaper, every day. let alone three or four and several hours searching news sites on the Internet, so I don't feel as informed as I usually do. So I have been assuming that UCLA is almost a cinch to lose to Houston, the nation's highest scoring team, today. So I found it interesting that the Register's Scott Reid actually has UCLA favored to win, arguing that Houston's big point totals came against bad teams, UCLA has more at stake, and is better athletically than Houston, and Kevin Prince is fully healthy for the first time this season.

I certainly hope he's right, and he just might be. I've mentioned previously that Neuheisel teams tend to get better as the season goes along, to learn from and correct their mistakes. I'll be watching to see if that happens this week. I hope it isn't an exercise in masochism.

Sad days for Bruins

It's not that I was so depressed by UCLA's pathetic performance against Stanford that I couldn't even write, although I must say that it was a sour way to end what was otherwise an exciting day of college football. My absence from the blogosphere has had to do with little projects around the house and the daily radiation treatment that messes up the whole middle of the day. As usual it starts with the offensive line, but there was almost no aspect of the game at which the Bruins threatened to show much competence. I keep hoping that Brehaut will show something when he's given some playing time, given that Kevin Prince seems injury-prone and the team will probably need him sometime this season, but so far the mistakes have outweighed the good moves.

I'm somewhat encouraged in that Neuheisel-coached teams do tend to improve over the course of a season, and there's at least a chance the Bruins will be competitive -- or better than the 8th-place predicted finish -- when Pac-10 play starts in earnest. But almost all the other Pac-10 teams so far, except maybe Washington State, have looked better than UCLA so far. And going against high-powered Houston this week and Texas next week, the Bruins could be 0-4. I hadn't planned to be hoping for basketball season to start this early, but . . .

A promising football Saturday

It's a veritable cornucopia of college football. Penn State-Alabama. Florida State-Oklahoma. Oregon-Tennessee. Georgia Tech-Kansas. And topped off tonight with UCLA in its home opener against Stanford. (USC's playing too.)

I'm always concerned about playing Stanford. They generally play the Bruins tough and have better football teams than they have any right to have, considering the nature of the school. I think it's because they've managed to attract some fine coaches -- although Jim Plunkett, John Elway and Toby Gerhart among others were hardly slouches as players. UCLA didn't look good last week, although some of the problems had to do with Prince being out for much of fall practice and not having enough reps, which could be solved by the first game and this week in corrective practice.

When I was on the Bruins Freshman team -- back when they had a Freshman team that you could make if you didn't quit, though that didn't assure playing time -- before the Stanford game our guards coach, Red Cochran, assembled us and gave a little speech on how, as our college careers progressed, we would come to hate Stanford with a special hate. They call themselves the Harvard of the West, they think they're several pegs above ordinary human beings, they think their shit don't stink. So they deserve to be hit extra hard to have some of that snobbishness knocked out of them, etc. etc. We took the advice to heart.

As the years passed and I spent time at Stanford, with the Hoover Institution as a media fellow and at other events and conferences, I couldn't necessarily bring myself to love the school, but I couldn't hate it either. Few of the Stanford students I met quite fit the caricature. I've even thought of lobbying for a resident position at Hoover after I'm finished newspapering (if that ever happens) and spending my declining years there, though that seems unlikely.

No hate, just grudging respect and a bit of concern.

Better next game?

Usually, when a team has trouble sustaining a drive, the most obvious problem is in the offensive line, and although I didn't focus as closely on the line as I perhaps should have (somewhat hampered by the fact that cameramen seldom stay with line play for long if at all) I think that's the main problem for the Bruins, who lost to Kansas State Saturday. It was also true that Kevin Prince, who, the commentators kept reminding us, had very few reps in practice because of an injury, was not especially sharp. He kept missing receivers by just a few inches or a foot or so. But he also didn't have very good protection. I winced every time he took off and ran with the ball, although he was fairly effective at it sometimes.

What any of this means for the future is difficult to tell. The Kevin Prince and the team just might start to click and be rather difficult to beat. But it also looks as if the Pac-10 will be very competitive. Based on this weekend's play USC and Arizona and Oregon State look pretty strong. I'll withhold judgment on the Bruins.

Bring on college football!

A few weeks ago it seemed as if it would never come, but college football season has begun! Of course my major interest is following my beloved but possibly -- we'll see how much -- beleaguered UCLA Bruins. I haven't had as much information from the newspaper as I usually get from reading the Register and other papers at work, so I don't have what I think is a realistic assessment of their prospects. I know only that Kevin Prince is the likely starting QB, expected to start though he had some kind of injury that kept him away from practice for a while. I hope Norm Chow's offensive schemes finally gel. At any rate, I'll be glued to the TV tomorrow at 12:30 PST. However it turns out, it should be more fund than watching the Chargers lose again while the homer announcers keep babbling as to how this is all to the good, it's toughening them up for the regular season.

Nice win, but . . .

I haven't acknowledged here the Bruin football team's nice win over Temple (take that, Bill Cosby!) in the EagleBank Bowl Dec. 29. The defense was mostly solid and the offense finally woke up in the second half. Exciting and worth watching. However, I'm not all that happy that defensive lineman Brian Price (only the Pac 10 defensive player of the year), a huge contributor, has decided to forego his senior year and enter the NFL draft. I guess I can't blame him. He has little or nothing left to prove and he's a likely first-rounder and is almost sure to have a heckuva pro career. And he has a family situation -- two brothers killed by gang violence in South Central and the family stuck there. And he was not the onlydefensive standout. But he's a huge impact player and I wish we had him back for another year.