DC Bruins blogged this morning about Southern Cal being one of the worst programs in D-1. The game tomorrow night should be a walk in the park. It is also a game that presents Ben Howland great opportunity to get his bench players real PT and get them ready for one last charge to the Big Dance (if there is one) in these closing weeks of 2011-12 season. Bruins should be stomping all over the Trojans tomorrow night and it should be another edition of UCLA taking care of business vs JustSC.

But that's the short term picture. The long term picture could become disconcerting for UCLA fans if the Trojans make moves to resuscitate the slim credibility of their hoops program after this season. The frustration is "mounting" among two dozen Trojan fans, who actually care about basketball. Okay, we are kidding here but on a serious note - Trojan honks are not happy at all about the current state of the hoops program. Even though at Southern Cal, everything is around football, it is a reasonable bet that their athletic director Pay Haden will make a move, if they think that the atrocious performance of their hoops teams is hurting the Trojan athletic brand.

So what if Haden decides to make a move after this season? That could potentially spell serious trouble for long term interest of the UCLA basketball program, which currently is leaderless and mired "in the abyss of irrelevance".

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A confession:

As time goes on, I find myself less and less interested in the vagaries of the recruiting process. I've gone from someone who spent the whole month of January and half of February neglecting work, family and friends while checking the various recruiting sites -- like Tracy Pierson's Bruin Report Online -- 200 times a day. It mattered to me, recruiting "wins" felt just as good as wins on the field.

I'm actually old enough to remember when very few people followed recruiting. In the 80s, before the advent of the Internet, full time recruiting reporters, All Star games on ESPN, scouting combines and the like, we found out who UCLA and USC got when the Los Angeles Times ran a piece the day after signing day. Those stories contained the same quote every year, when then-coach Terry Donahue would remind us that "You can't judge a recruiting class until a few years down the road."

If you're expecting me to criticize Coach Donahue for that remark (which sort of channeled his weekly pre-game poor-mouthing, when he'd assert that 1-7 Oregon State was "the best 1-7 team he'd ever seen" and that he expected the game to be a real challenge), you're only partially right. On one hand, it was typical Donahue, lowering expectations as insurance against potentially average results.

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Well Jim Mora started his first day at UCLA by sending a signal towards "culture change." It looks like he may have more changing to do to turn around the mindset of UCLA football program. Check out what Joe Fauria just tweetd:

That would be the same Fauria whose team got blanked 0-50 by Southern Cal and put together an embarrassing and impotent offensive performance against Illinois in the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl. That would be the same Fauria running smack against 13-1 program, coming from a team that has not come close to sniffing a BCS bowl game in 10+ years.

To say that this is embarrassing is an understatement. This is not the first time Fauria has made himself look silly and embarrassed UCLA on Twitter. Remember Mora apparently talked to players about tweeting in his first day on campus back in December. If Mora really means business in terms of instituting a culture of discipline in the UCLA football program, perhaps he ought to have a talk with his starting TE to make sure our players do not embarrass themselves and the school this way.

Alabama plays Louisiana State in the BCS Championship game on Monday. It's a rematch of a game these two schools (featuring two very cool SBN blogs And The Valley Shook and Roll 'Bama Roll) played earlier in the year, a 9-6 overtime win for LSU on November 5, 2011.

I remember exactly where I was when LSU's Drew Alleman kicked a 25-yard field goal to give the Tigers the win: I was sitting in my car, in traffic, attempting to navigate through sand traps outside the Rose Bowl after our 29-28 win over Arizona State.

That was a weird game, weirder now even, the view skewed by the events of the past month, month and a half. The game was a billed as a battle for the Pac 12 South, the winner would control their destiny on the way to the conference's first title game. We took the lead with less than a minute to go on a short touchdown run by Derrick Coleman. Then Brock Osweiler led the Sun Devils right into field goal range (aided by a very questionable pass interference penalty), only to see ASU's kicker miss for the second time in the fourth quarter. You know the rest of the story, though we controlled our own destiny, needing just to win out to get to the conference title game, we instead struggled down the stretch, getting blown out by both Utah and USC as we backed into the playoff game where we lost to Oregon. Interestingly, Noel Mazzone, who called plays for ASU as their offensive coordinator that day is now UCLA's OC/QB coach.

Now it's almost two months later and while what might have been the inevitable rematch between the country's two best teams is scheduled for Monday, Monday also marks the real beginning of the Jim Mora era at UCLA.

Sure, Mora has been on the job for a while by now, hiring staff and doing the recruiting thing, but he kept the existing team at arm's length, allowing Interim Head Coach Mike Johnson and company to run things through the bowl game. With classes starting next week, the players returning to campus are now Mora's responsibility.

With that in mind, I thought it would be interesting to go back to a post I wrote (I think it's important to note that while the post run under my byline, it was a joint effort by Bruins Nation's front page bloggers; the ideas expressed where shaped and shared by the whole group) outlining the criteria we felt were necessary for our next head coach. To put it in context, the post was written just after the Thursday night blowout loss to Arizona. (As an aside, someone with better research skills than me should go back and see what UCLA's record on ESPN/ABC has been the last few years in football and men's basketball. I don't have the results in front of me, but it feels like every time we get a national TV game, we get lit up.)

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Pac-12 just released its official schedule for 2012 football season. Here is how our schedule shapes up:

Sat., Sept. 1 UCLA at Rice
Sat. Sept. 8 Nebraska at UCLA
Sat., Sept. 15 Houston at UCLA
Sat., Sept. 22 Oregon State at UCLA
Sat., Sept. 29 UCLA at Colorado
Sat., Oct. 6 UCLA at California
Sat., Oct. 13 Utah at UCLA
Sat., Oct. 20 BYE
Sat., Oct. 27 UCLA at Arizona State
Sat., Nov. 3 Arizona at UCLA
Sat., Nov. 10 UCLA at Washington State
Sat., Nov. 17 Southern Cal at UCLA
Sat., Nov. 24 Stanford at UCLA

The full Pac-12 schedule can be viewed here.

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DrJay32 put up a fan shot about Coach Bartow earlier, but it's worth a front page post. Former UCLA head coach Gene Bartow has passed away.

Gene Bartow succeeded Coach John Wooden as UCLA's head coach; Coach retired after the 1975 title game.

Prior to coming to UCLA, Coach Bartow had a number of collegiate head coaching positions, most notably at Memphis State (now the University of Memphis), where his 1973 Tigers squad finished as the national runner-up to Coach Wooden's Bill Walton-led squad. He left Memphis State for Illinois, coaching in Champaign for one season before being tapped by AD J.D. Morgan as UCLA's coach.

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Better men (and women) than me have made the case that college football needs a playoff system while also railing at the current system of bowl games. I'm not gonna even try.

But, playoffs aside, I do want to note that the bowl game thing has run its course.

As I finish up this post, I'm looking at Rutgers "battle" Iowa State in something called the New Era Pinstripe Bowl "live from Yankee Stadium." As far as I can tell, there's almost no one at the game. And there is no reason why anyone other than a diehard Iowa State or Rutgers fan with nothing better to do on a Friday afternoon would be at the game.

It's been like this the past few weeks. Random teams facing off against other random teams in random stadiums in random cities playing in games with random sponsors. As far as I can tell, there hasn't been one memorable moment in any bowl game so far.

And yet we're told that this "system" of bowl games is the best we can do to end the season of one of the best spectator sports in North America, possibly the most universally enjoyed sports we have in this country.

Whatever.

Of course, I'm writing this in advance of the good games coming up over the next week or so. Stanford and Oklahoma State looks pretty good, the Rose Bowl looks pretty good and the LSU-Alabama game looks good on paper, except for the fact that the last time they played on actual grass the game ended 9-6.

In overtime.

There are still some meaningless games left on the bowl slate and, come to think of it, as a UCLA fan I probably have no right to mention the meaninglessness of Rutgers taking on Iowa State in a baseball park ill-suited for football.

That's because we'll be taking on Illinois in another baseball stadium particularly ill-suited for football: ATT Park in San Francisco, home of the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl.

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Earlier today Bruce Davis, a DE from Karl Dorrell era fired off couple of tweets blasting coach Jim Mora's pledge to put an end to "over the wall" (OTW) "tradition" at UCLA:

Who does Jim Mora think he is saying that he is going to change a tradition that has been in place since the late 70's...

If Mora is gonna come in changing **** like this it better translate to wins on the field. If not this is all just hot air. We shall see.

Davis has deleted those tweets. It appears that Marc Dellins got to him and he promptly deleted his rants. We did not save screenshots of those comments but they are out there and they provide good examples of the mindset of entitlement that has permeated this program in this past decade.

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Looks like Matt Barkley is going to pull a Matt Leinart and return for his "senior season" at Southern Cal. The Trojans have called a presser for this afternoon (1 pm PST) during which Barkley is going to return his decision. There is not a lot of suspense on Twitter around this.

Bruce Feldman has the reasons why Barkley may be coming back:

3 reasons why Barkley may stay: shot to win BCS after enduring sanctions; family's close (sister's a USC FR) & he loves being a college kid.

Matt Leinart chimes in through twitterati:

So does @MattBarkley stay or does he go?? In my opinion, I think he stays!! You heard it first here

If Barkley ends up more like Leinart than Sanchez that will not bode well for him in the NFL. If Barkley went to the pros this year he would have been a top-10 pick. If he comes back - and the chatter indicates that he is - he is potentially taking a huge risk and leaving millions on the table.

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To no one's surprise local writers and beat reporters are having a field day with the latest UCLA football episode of the lame "over the wall" stunt. Scott Reid from the OC Register used the news hook to trash the program. He wrote up a post in which he took some cheap shots to pile on yesterday. It's painful to read.

If you look past some of Reid's cheap shots though there are some important points worth sharing on BN:

One can only imagine [Jim] Mora's reaction when he found out Tuesday that his new team had gone "over the wall." Just guessing that it was something like the response of Bruin quarterback Kevin Prince, who was less than amused that by his teammates antics. While other Bruins were also upset on Tuesday, Mora takes over a team whose sense of entitlement is matched only by its tone deafness, the latter characteristic it shares with the administration. When their per diem checks were withheld because they skipped the conditioning work-outs, several players took to pouting on Twitter and Facebook.

"Genocide in Westwood," one player characterized the mess in a tweet.

The following day interim coach Mike Johnson responded by holding a practice that lasted barely an hour, if that. Hey, it was raining. A few days later the Bruins were given the day off to play paintball. Tuesday the Bruins went AWOL. In less than a week they'll arrive in San Francisco thanks to Guerrero and Chancellor Gene Block. Block's oversight of the athletic department and presence can both be summed up in a single word: underwhelming. When UCLA accepted an invitation to play in the 2007 Las Vegas Bowl despite a 6-6 record, one of Block's predecessors, former UCLA chancellor Charles Young complained to the Register, "UCLA has no business playing in a bowl game with the kind of season they've had."

Young was right then and the four years later the Bruins are even less deserving. But Block and Guerrero are sending the Bruins to a bowl nonetheless.

At least UCLA will finally be part of the national conversation, Neuheisel so longed to be a part of. The Interim Bowl, 6-7 UCLA vs. 6-6 Illinois, a national joke.

The question is will anyone in Westwood care?

That's a question we have been asking relentlessly here on BN. It's fresh in our minds today as we are also discussing a new marketing fail from the Morgan Center as they rolled out another silly poster to promote a new coach. So where is Chancellor Gene Block on all this?

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According to Sports Illustrated, Baron Davis is now a member of the New York Knicks.

Baron Davis' desire to play in New York outweighed the chance to play with Kobe Bryant or LeBron James.

The veteran point guard signed with the Knicks on Monday, passing up a chance to join stronger teams because he said he always saw himself playing at Madison Square Garden.

No word on whether Davis' decision to play in New York had anything to do with his buddy Steve Lavin.

jlegs fanshotted the news of Reeves Nelson taking off to Lithuania for pro ball.

The LA Times Fabulous Forum blog shared some more details on this development:

Former UCLA forward Reeves Nelson, who was dismissed from the Bruins last week, is expected to sign a contract to play professional basketball with a Lithuanian team as early as Friday, said his father, Brian.

Contrary to reports, Reeves has not signed a contract yet, but one is expected to arrive via e-mail soon. "I've been given an indication that something will be in place today," Brian Nelson said.

We wish good luck to Nelson.

There is a person in my life who makes predictions for a living. I prefer not to be too specific, but I can tell you that their work requires extensive analysis of the economy and financial sectors -- with an eye on commodities -- and then make predictions on where prices are going in the future. There are people who rely on this person and a lot of money is risked and invested based on these predictions.

There are real stakes involved.

But my friend/colleague is not always right. No one is always right. Trying to guess the future price of gold or silver six months, a year, two or three years from now is an inexact science to say the least.

But my colleague, she has an interesting way of looking at her work. She feels that those who follow her rely a little too much on the end results, the final numbers or predictions. They don't pay enough attention to the underlying story that accompanies the tables and the charts. That's the important stuff, she says, that people often overlook. She puts it this way:

"Achilles, I'd rather be wrong for the right reasons," she says, "then right for the wrong reasons."

The reasoning is this: Sound methodology is more important than predictions. No one can account for every possible factor that impacts the outcome. But if your arguments are sound, not only will you do a good job of making predictions but you'll be able to justify your mistakes and retain your credibility. Anyone can guess right once in a while, even the the broken clock is right twice a day.

So, what's that got to do with UCLA and UCLA football?

I'm glad you asked:

The point is that even if Dan Guerrero turns our right regarding Jim Mora, the criticism of the process that brought Mora to UCLA is still sound. The fact of the matter is, the process that began with a full-court press (that's a big "my bad" for mixing my sports metaphors) on Chris Petersen and ended with the late-on-a-Friday, after-the-papers-went-to-press-and-Sports-Center-has-already-been-taped hiring of Jim Mora remains seriously flawed whether or not Mora proves successful. If Mora turns out to be a great coach, this will be a case of the athletic director being right for the wrong reasons.

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According to a report emanating from SBN Network's Minnesota Timberwolves site, former UCLA guard Malcolm Lee has been signed by the team.

The Minnesota Timberwolves were quite active on draft night back in June, but many of the transactions were forgotten following the long period of inactivity caused by the NBA lockout. One of those moves was the Wolves acquiring UCLA Bruins guard Malcolm Leefrom the Chicago Bulls in exchange for the rights to Nikola Mirotic.

The Wolves apparently signed the 43rd overall pick on Monday morning, shortly after inking first round pick Derrick Williams, according to Sports Illustrated's Sam Amick.

SI's Sam Amick, who is the source for this story, says it is a three year guaranteed contract, rare for a 2nd round pick.

Last week we noted the New York Times highlighting of BruinsNation's all out pressure on athletic director Dan Guerrero. The Old Gray Lady has been keeping a close eye on the pressure this community is bringing to bear on UCLA's sommelier. The NTY's writer Paul Meyerberg has now followed with a scathing column torching Guerrero for the hiring of Jim Mora.

Meyerberg is the lead writer of Pre Snap Read, a NYT associated college football blog which is one of the best reads in the business. He doesn't mince his words on Mora:

The latest coach to make the wires, former Falcons and Seahawks coach Jim Mora, possesses a year-by-year record that reads like an eye chart: 11-5, 8-8, 7-9, 5-11. The wins get smaller the farther down you go. But this is U.C.L.A., and this is Guerrero, and the latter's history of bumbling the steps needed to create a winning football program does not give many reason for optimism. ...

[T]his is a coach who wore out his welcome in Atlanta in three years, thanks in part to the touch that led the Falcons from within one win of the Super Bowl to back-to-back non-winning seasons. Mora lasted four months with the Seahawks in 2009, leaving three years and $12 million remaining on his contract. At neither stop did he - how to put this - endear himself to his team, bosses or fan base.

Nevertheless, all signs point to Mora. He's Guerrero's pick, which counts for something - it counts for everything, in fact. If he's the choice, U.C.L.A. will go from a coach who wanted nothing more than to be in Westwood to a coach who wore out his welcome at each of his major stops.

Meyerberg also tore Guerrero apart for his lack of preparedness during coaching search by comparing his botched effort to the methodical ones conducted by Washington State's Bill Moos and Arizona's Greg Byrne:

[G]uerrero and the university should have known Neuheisel was working on borrowed time; Guerrero himself said on Oct. 18 that "returning to a bowl is just one of several steps we need to take to get this program to the level we all desire." With the current coach firmly affixed to the hot seat, why didn't U.C.L.A. begin investigating future options in early November, if not sooner?

Guerrero and the Bruins are adrift. Lost without a paddle. In deep water, and the only possible conclusion is this: U.C.L.A. has no idea what it's doing. How else can you explain a search that started without a plan and has rapidly deteriorated into a free-for-all - worse yet, a search that seems to have no endgame? Hiring Jim Mora can't be the grand plan, can it?

Read the full piece here.

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In 2000, Pete Carroll was not the first choice to become USC's head football coach. For those interested in who was, I suggest Google, it's not important here. Just know that Carroll was not a shoe-in for that job and had to impress USC's then-athletic director Mike Garrett. Garrett, in case you didn't know, was (I guess still is) a Heisman Trophy-winning running back who played at Southern Cal and later with the Kansas City Chiefs. He was (I guess, still is) a football guy.

Carroll to that point was an NFL coach (sound familiar) who had been with the San Francisco 49ers (sound familiar) as an assistant and had also had two relatively unsuccessful stints as a head coach (sound familiar) in the NFL.

When Carroll got his interview from Garrett, it was reported that he presented detailed game plans for how he would attack and defend USC's Pac 10 opponents. This supposedly blew Mike Garrett away. Even if that interview has evolved a bit mythically, Carroll clearly had been thinking about what he would do if he ever became USC's coach. He was prepared.

UCLA's new head coach Jim L. Mora -- whose resume today is eerily similar to Carroll's circa 2000 -- said today that he was looking forward to figuring out how to defend college offenses.From Gold's transcript:

"The other challenge will certainly be adapting to some of the unique offenses we have seen in college football that are different than you see in pro football. You see things out of Oregon and some other teams that you don't see in pro football. I'm excited about having the opportunity to learn how to defend those offenses. I've coached defensive football my entire life, I've coached on some outstanding defensive staffs, and I look forward to the challenge. I look forward to the newness of it."

Translation: He hasn't really thought about yet. He's looking forward to thinking about it. It's pretty clear he didn't present Dan Guerrero with a detailed plan on how he would attack and defend all of UCLA's Pac 12 opponents.

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Great stories make you feel things, right?

Are you angry? Upset? Confused? Hopeful? Excited ... but braced for a letdown?

All of the above?

Are you watching a replay of any random UCLA football game from the last decade?

Or are you following Chianti Dan and His Last Crusade, the third installment of what we can only hope is just a trilogy.

Of course, you remember volume one, Receivers of the Lost Ark, the one where a bold, new athletic director fired Bob Toledo, flirted with Mike Riley, then settled on the always engaging and gregarious Karl Dorrell to be UCLA's newest football coach. That one opened so strong, with Chianti Dan cracking his whip and announcing we would "Fire Out" and compete for championships. Of course, the plot of that one took a turn for the absurd right around the time Dorrell "forgot" about Manuel White and told the press he didn't know where to stand on the sidelines. Other than one great scene, the 13-9 scene, that version slowly withered until Dan yelled "Cut."

And no one can forget Chianti Dan and the Temple of Neu, the one where our star maneuvered to bring back the down on his luck, oft-fired, prodigal son back into the fold. It was, in some ways, the inevitable sequel but in retrospect one that should never have been made. We knew the story was over long before our hero did, hoping he'd make one last dramatic move after the Debacle in the Desert -- alas Chianti Dan let the whole thing run on too long, damaging Part III even before it began.

Now, we're watching Chianti Dan On His Last Crusade, which we can only hope is the last installment of the "Chianti Dan Tries to Get It Right When Hiring a Football Coach" series.

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In last 48 hours we have been looking into Jim Mora's track record and experience as a football coach. As discussed Mora's resume raises a lot of concerns. We have also been looking into reflections on Mora's coaching from Seattle and Atlanta fanbases on SBN. What we have found out so far is pretty troubling and seems to raise more red flags around Mora.

Take for example this post from abender20 on SBN's Seahawk's blog Field Gulls. When the decision to fire Mora was announced to the Seahawks fanbase, here is how abender20 ripped into Mora for his difficulties with player evaluation:

As Head Coach, Mora brought in some interesting coaching talent in guys like Dan Quinn and Gus Bradley. Do we credit Mora for seeing some bright young minds or do we debit him for bringing in coordinators running a zone defensive scheme that was ill-suited for his on-field talent? It's the evaluation of personnel that strikes me as the larger failing. This season saw the continued overuse of Patrick Kerney, Craig Terrill, and Colin Cole. Owen Schmitt had a lot of development time wasted as Justin Griffith kept playing. While I like Julius Jones and what he can bring offensively, Forsett was frequently the more effective back (DVOA agrees) and didn't see enough touches. Olindo Mare and Chris Spencer. John touched on his leadership issues quite a bit, as well as the handling of the offensive line. The late-season loss of Derek Walker just to avoid some vague notion of mailing it in. The retention of Bruce DeHaven (this will likely be remedied in short order). There are plenty of reasons to help justify a change.

Brutal. More after the jump.

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None other than the New York Times has weighed in on the progress -- or lack thereof -- of Chianti Dan's coaching "search." The Grand Old Lady also noted the pressure this blog continues to bring to bear on UCLA's sommelier:

A bit further west, at U.C.L.A., another coaching search appears to be stuck in neutral. Rick Neuheisel was fired in the wake of losing 50-0 to cross-town rival U.S.C. in the last game of the year. Neuheisel had coached the Bruins for four seasons, with a 21-28 record. What did him in was an 0-4 record against U.S.C. and the blowout losses.

then:

The next target is Jim Mora Jr., who has interviewed, but there is no offer yet on the table. Bloggers, such as Bruins Nation, are lambasting the pace, and lack of results, by Guerrero and U.C.L.A.

The important thing to note -- along with the classy periods between U-C-L-A that only the New York Times and our own gbruin use -- is that the pressure this community continues to bring to the process is being noticed on a national scale. Our voiced are being heard. Don't let up.

Jonathan Givony of DraftExpress.com, writing at Grantland, has a piece on once-a-Bruin, now-a-Rebel Mike Moser.

He quotes UCLA head coach Ben Howland from a May story that appeared on ESPN.com. He also quotes Moser:

Howland: "I'm supportive of him finding a program where he will have a chance to play more minutes than we envision he will have here."

Moser: "I feel it is necessary for me personally, to make a move somewhere else so I can play."

Then, he notes that:

Moser plays 31 minutes, scoring 16 points and grabbing 18 rebounds - outplaying potential lottery picksJohn Henson and Tyler Zeller - while helping UNLV knock off top-ranked North Carolina.

Four days later, he scores 34 points and grabs 10 rebounds in a double-overtime win at UC-Santa Barbara, bringing his team's record to 8-0 on the season.

Before asking this question:

Where did things go wrong for Howland? Was it really worth running Moser out of the program for the sake of giving Nikola Dragovic 32 minutes per game? The 6-foot-9 Serbian power forward rewarded his loyal coach by pulling down 4.4 rebounds, shooting 37 percent from the field, andgetting arrested twice, as part of a disastrous 14-18 season. (In both cases, charges were either dropped or not filed.)

Every great game Mike Moser has for UNLV makes Ben Howland and UCLA simply look bad. Moser's decision to attend UCLA after first committing to Arizona was considered a huge coup for us. Then, Howland squandered an entire year of Moser's eligiblity by playing him garbage minutes instead of redshirting him. He also played him out of position at the three, while Moser is really an unconventional four.

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Oh yeah, that's right.

We have a game tonight.

Winner gets Roses.

If there's been a crazier week for UCLA football fans, I don't remember it.

This week alone we've experienced the most humiliating loss ever in the rivalry series with UCLA, saw our head coach fired, then three days later watched the team emotionally carry him off the field on their shoulders in tribute and all the while our athletic director has embarked on a Quixotic search for a new head coach.

I wish I could say it's been fun, but it hasn't.

The truth is, it should never have gone down this way, it should never have happened.

Bruins Nation made the call first. In an October 21 front page post (posted under the collective "Bruins Nation" byline) titled "Clean the House: Time for Wholesale Regime Change at UCLA," we wrote (in the wake of the Debacle in the Desert, played the night before):

So after last night, no matter what happens the rest of the season, we can say absolutely, without any doubt, that Rick Neuheisel is not the man for the job in Westwood.

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Barnes To Stokes (via rongee)

There are no other considerations this week.

There is no wondering what a win means in the long run, whether or not a victory might or might not be enough to save Rick Neuheisel’s job or whether or not it was a good idea to wear alternative uniforms or how Arizona hiring Rich Rodriguez impacts our search for a new coach.

This is USC week and the only thing that matters is burying the Trojans and their stupid horse, too.

There are a couple of stories that make the rounds during SC week. I’m sure I’ll get the details wrong – feel free to let me know where I screwed up. But the details don’t matter, not really.

The first comes from 1989. This was a transition year for UCLA football. We were coming off back-to-back 10 win seasons with Troy Aikman under center and had won seven bowl games in seven seasons. After starting off 3-2, we lost five straight and were sitting at 3-7 heading into the Coliseum. USC was 8-2 (and would go on to beat Michigan in the Rose Bowl). The Trojans were favored big time, but the game was close. We missed a long field goal at the end – hit the crossbar, if I recall correctly – and the game ended in a 10-10 tie.

After the game, as the story goes, a few of the redshirt freshmen linemen were all smiles. Given their record and ours, that tie felt like a win. But then they noticed that the upper classmen, the senior linemen they looked up to weren’t smiling. Some of them had tears running down their face, one was beating his locker with his fists. The freshmen were confused. Hadn’t we just overcome the odds and tied a ranked team – in some sense ruining their season. Maybe. But that didn’t matter to the seniors. All they knew was that they’d given all they had. They fought and they scrapped and they battled and when the game was over there was nothing left. They’d left it all out on the field. They were spent.

There is another story along these lines and I’m sure I’m going to mess it up a little bit. The essence of the story is what’s important. The story involves one of our former coaches giving the pregame talk to his players before going out against USC. And the exclamation point at the end of the talk went like this:

"Gentlemen, you might never remember what you did in the game against Oregon. But you’ll remember for the rest of your lives what you did in the USC game."

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The past few seasons have seen the rise of the "alternative" uniform as teams don special unis to commemorate an occasion or fire up the fans. Some schools (quack) have taken the alternative uniform thing to an extreme, while others have broken them out for a nationally televised game or a "black/white-out" for their fans. While some traditionalist nitpick the idea, the view here is that it's a fun thing to do and, besides, the kids (read: recruits) seem to dig it.

UCLA, naturally, has stuck with the tried and true, the rumor is that Adidas would love to use UCLA to show what they can do, but the Morgan Center has refused to stray -- the exceptions being some "special" jersey material that mostly makes the linemen look really fat and some stickers on the helmets. Morgan Center as usual have been laaaaame.

Now, word has come down that UCLA will be busting out an all-white, alternative ensemble for the game against Southern Cal. From Dan Guerrero's latest "blog":

There have been rampant rumors out there recently that our football team might be sporting a special look when they take the field for the USC game on Saturday evening. I can confirm that those rumors are indeed true. We will be unveiling a uniform that we have been working on with the adidas design team for several months. These new uniforms will provide us with an alternative to our existing road uniforms but will not replace them in perpetuity. That said, I’m not going to tell you everything in this blog – but look for hints the remainder of the week by liking UCLA Athletics on Facebook or following @UCLAAthletics on Twitter

What?

Let me get this straight: After refusing to do anything cool with the uniforms and sticking with tradition, UCLA is going to break tradition for the one game when flying your True Blue colors means more than anything else. Seriously? The one time when you want everyone wearing blue no matter what, UCLA is going with surrender-flag white?

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I'm just going to admit it:

On some level, I'm going to be sad to see Rick Neuheisel go.

Just so we're clear, my personal top criteria for a UCLA football coach was and is "No prior ties to UCLA football." For me, both Karl Dorrell and Rick Neuheisel were mistakes if for no other reason than their prior association with the program. What others saw as "we need a UCLA guy because only a UCLA guy will understand the culture at UCLA and deal with it" I saw as "we need an outsider who won't go along with the UCLA football culture because it is the culture that's the problem and the culture needs changing and only an outsider will try and seriously change the culture."

No matter - my point is not to declare "I told you so" nor is it to point up other reasons why Rick Neusheisel was the wrong choice. It doesn't matter now who said what, way back when.

But I did want to say, that even though I was never his biggest proponent, I'm going to miss him when he's gone.

See, for the last 15 years or so, the Rick Neusheisel coaching regime and what he might do as head coach was a specter hanging over the program, an unfulfilled myth wrought with potential and promise. From the moment Terry Donahue passed Rick Neusheisel over for the offensive coordinator's position and imported Bob Toledo from Texas aTm and Rick Neusheisel left to become Bill McCartney's OC in Colorado, UCLA fans - me included - have wondered what kind of head coach Rick Neuheisel would be at UCLA.

And when Rick Neusheisel had some success at Colorado, both as a coordinator and again as their head coach, and when he duplicated some of that success as the head coach at Washington, UCLA fans were left to wonder what he could do as our head coach. When we fired Bob Toledo, surely Neuheisel was considered as a replacement, though the timing wasn't right given some of his problems at UW. But when Dorrell didn't cut it, the time had arrived: After years of wondering what would happen if Rick Neuheisel became our head coach, we'd finally find out.

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Too little, too late?

After getting our windows blown out by Hurricane Wildcat last month, Bruins Nation officially declared Rick Neuheisel’s program a disaster area and ordered it condemned from the top down. From that point on, no amount of spackle and duct tape could seal the leaks and I’m running out of weather metaphors. Point is: as much as we might like the guy, Rick Neuheisel needs to go. (I’m reminded of that old saying "The world’s full of nice guys – that’s why there isn’t much of a demand for them.")

But since the Debacle in the Desert, Neuheisel has regrouped, at least on the surface. The Bruins topped a weak Cal Bears team in semi-convincing fashion, then held on to win against an ASU Sun Devils squad that’s notoriously weak on the road and that featured a particularly poor placekicker.

If the great "What if" scenario after the Arizona game ended with "UCLA wins out" then Neuheisel is theoretically two steps closer to making the case that he somehow turned things around and somehow deserves another year.

He doesn’t.

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Whew.

I'm just now coming down from the high that was that dramatic win over the mighty Golden Bears of Cal. It's games like this that remind you of exactly why we follow college football.

Oh wait ...

Actually, that's how people are likely going to feel next week as the nation replays and dissects tomorrow night's battle between LSU and Alabama.

With the focus all week on the Tigers and the Tide, I've been thinking about how much fun it is when your team is involved in the national college football picture, when your school is relevant, when you matter. I've been recalling how it feels to have ESPN and USA Today and Yahoo and the major websites and blogs talking about you, how cool it is when the names of the players on your team are on the lips of fans across the country.

The last time UCLA mattered in football was in 1997 and 1998, when Bob Toledo's Cade McNown-led teams won twenty straight games. The funny thing about that streak is that I remember the losses that preceded them (one to Ryan Leaf's Washington State team, the other to Peyton Manning's Tennessee Vols) and the ones that followed (the defensive debacle in Miami that cost us a shot at a rematch with Tennessee in the national title game - a game we would have almost surely won -- and the it-doesn't-matter-anymore loss to Wisconsin in the Rose Bowl).

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The L.A. Times has been counting down a reader's poll the past few weeks, naming the greatest sports figures in Los Angeles history. 

Before today, the list already contained a number of Bruins, including #10 Jackie Robinson and #5 Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. We've been waiting and wondering to see where Coach John Wooden would land on the list. 

This morning Coach was revealed as #4 among the city's greatest sports legends. According to the blog post, he received 251 first place votes, but was astonishingly left off a number of ballots altogether. No matter. Coach's legend and legacy is secure forever, this small honor represents just another recognition of the impact he had on this city and our school.

I am curious to know who the top three on the list will be. The best guess is Magic Johnson, Vin Scully and Sandy Koufax. All in all, great company to be in.

Dan Guerrero sent out his latest edition of "Word of Westwood" last night. The athletic department published it on their official site today. The weekly newsletter lamely labeled as a "blog" and then emailed to season ticket holders is once again a vanilla mix of boring, cheesy press releasy type of paragraphs, larded up with soul less bureaucratic jargon.

This week's newsletter stands out for one thing. Guerrero doesn't bother to address the state of the football program until the seventh paragraph. If one takes a quick look at it the person will most likely miss it as Guerrero raptures about our volleyball, soccer and water polo programs.  That's nice. We appreciate our non-revenue programs as much as any other UCLA communities. We probably do more than any other to talk them up. But if Guerrero was competent and confident, he'd be leading with the topic that is currently dominating the conversation among Bruin alums and fans, who are interested in UCLA athletics.

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We caught the Dan Patrick Show this morning. He had Pat Forde on as a guest. Forde, we gather from listening, recently made a switch from covering college football for ESPN to covering it for Yahoo. (ESPN staffers are not allowed on the Dan Patrick Show -- by order of ESPN, not Patrick.)

The discussed Forde's move and some other college football stuff. Eventually they started talking BCS and Boise State and then Dan Patrick brings up UCLA. This is a (very) rough transcript (you can listen to the whole thing here, the UCLA talk starts roughly at the 6:30 mark). 

Dan Patrick: What are you gonna do if you're UCLA?

Pat Forde: I'd change coaches, no doubt about it.

DP: I think you've got to change the culture if you're changing coaches. You have to decide if you're all in and I just don't ... I think UCLA is sorta in with college football.

PF: I agree with that ... and damn them for being sorta in ... (some joking about how the SEC would not approve of our ambivalent approach to college football)

DP: I always thought that this was Chris Petersen's job. Is this job beneath the Boise coach?

PF: I would have said yes ... (then he talks about how conference realignment and how he might change his mind ...)

Okay, a few points.

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