Remember when UCLA led Miami late in the 1998 regular-season finale between the two teams in the old Orange Bowl stadium?
The Bruins somehow lost that lead and the game. They failed to make the first BCS National Championship Game in the 1999 Fiesta Bowl against Tennessee. They played the 1999 Rose Bowl against Wisconsin with the flat emotional feel of a team that had in fact been gut-punched a month earlier.
UCLA football hasn’t been the same since.
The Bruins used to be a relatively consistent team, a team which would win the Pac-10 every few years and play a prestigious January bowl with the same relative level of frequency. Terry Donahue easily belongs on the list of the Pac-12’s 10 best coaches since the league expanded from eight teams to 10 in 1978, with the additions of Arizona State and Arizona. UCLA won three Rose Bowls in the 1980s under Donahue, more than any other Pac-10 or Big Ten team in the decade.
Given what UCLA continued to achieve under Donahue after the 1986 Rose Bowl (a Cotton Bowl win over Arkansas, another Rose Bowl trip in the 1993 season), and given what UCLA did before Donahue came aboard (Dick Vermeil upsetting Woody Hayes and Ohio State in the 1976 Rose Bowl; Gary Beban’s teams making their presence felt in the middle section of the 1960s), the Bruins really do have a proud football tradition. No, it’s not as deep as USC’s tradition just across the way in Los Angeles, but it stands tall on its own merits.
Yet, since that one-month period at the end of 1998 and the beginning of 1999, UCLA has not been able to win a single conference crown or play in any bowl game under the BCS (now New Year’s Six) umbrella.
While the college football internet is drunk on the hashtag #Clemsoning, even as the Tigers continue to affirm their new identity as a program which achieves a lot, the sport’s online community should be using #BRUINING as the new hashtag which denotes the squandering of pigskin prosperity.
UCLA had everything set up for itself in the Pac-12 after the events of week four. A blowout road win over the defending Pac-12 South champions from Arizona put the Bruins in prime position to own the division. USC had already taken a hit. The Arizona State team the Bruins faced on Saturday night in Pasadena had played horribly throughout the month of September. UCLA was installed as a favorite of nearly two touchdowns. Quarterback Josh Rosen had seemingly grown from some wobbly moments earlier in the season to become something closer to the leader Jim Mora, Jr., hoped he would be.
UCLA was playing a home game, one it expected to win. Gridiron riches lay within the Bruins’ grasp.
Sound familiar?
This was the story — under even more dramatic circumstances — last November. The Bruins entered their regular-season (regularly-scheduled) finale as a clear favorite against a 6-5 Stanford team that was playing out the string. Yet, when the game started, Stanford looked like the team playing for a division title at the end of a 12-game journey. UCLA, the team with everything to play for, was pancake-flat, bowled over by the energy from the other sideline and the other side of the line of scrimmage. UCLA took a perfect pregame scenario and, in 60 minutes, turned it into misery.
That’s #BRUINING, everyone. It’s been happening throughout this century without any real exception.
You could perhaps cite a 10-2 season in 2005 as an exception, but a Sun Bowl game against Northwestern really didn’t offer UCLA the chance to say it beat an elite opponent in the postseason. Had the Bruins defeated someone with more chops and stature, we might look back on 2005 as a moment in which UCLA truly stood against the tide of the past 17 years. Yet, things being what they are, the 2005 season doesn’t stand out that much from the crowd. When UCLA stumbled in 2006 (even with its memorable upset of USC), the 2005 season was a lot harder to respect. It didn’t lead to anything better.
Hmmm… good things not leading to something better — that’s exactly how you’d characterize UCLA’s season after this failure against Arizona State.
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For most of the evening, ASU — which looked like the team we’ve seen the past few seasons — played with most of the energy, most of the passion, most of the precision which was being displayed on the Rose Bowl stadium’s expansive piece of real estate. The Sun Devils’ defense swarmed to the ball, with the Bruins being on their heels. Arizona State played with pace and purpose, while UCLA appeared unresponsive in comparison. The Bruins did mount a late rally, but then Mora — reminding us why he hasn’t yet turned the corner in the Arroyo Seco — intentionally took a safety when trailing by six points. (You can bet you’ll read more on that in the coming days here at TSS.)
UCLA’s defense responded to that intentional safety with THIS play right here.
It was a vintage UCLA performance in a home game of consequence — this century, and specifically under Mora.
Get this: We’re roughly halfway through Mora’s fourth season (but very early in Mora’s fourth Pac-12 Conference season). The Bruins’ current coach has already lost seven home games. Should he lose one more this year, that will make a clean average of two home losses per season. UCLA has not lost fewer than three Pac-12 games in any of Mora’s seasons in L.A. With this loss now official and the meat of the schedule still to come (Stanford, Utah and USC, among others), the odds have suddenly shifted toward the Bruins losing at least three league games for yet another season.
Want to come up with a hashtag for squandering college football prosperity?
You shouldn’t look in the East or Southeast anymore, not in the ACC or SEC, either. Not the Big Ten, not the Big 12.
You need to go West, young man or woman. Go to the shadows of the San Gabriel Mountains, the place where college football’s oldest and most revered postseason game is staged every New Year’s afternoon. Go to the Rose Bowl stadium.
There, every year in the 21st century, you will find #BRUINING at work.
Another solid three and a half hours were logged on Saturday night against Arizona State.
