PASADENA — Honestly, it’s just sad.
Unless you’re a USC fan, you can’t even enjoy any schadenfreude, because no one else really feels strongly enough about UCLA football to derive pleasure from watching the Bruins flounder or seeing their fans flee.
The Bruins aren’t supposed to be great at football; they’re supposed to be great at basketball.
But UCLA is supposed to be decent at football, competent, good – one of those teams that will reward its fan base with a fun, memorable season every few years.
The Bruins are not supposed to embarrass their university.
They’re not supposed to get pushed around by New Mexico. They’re not supposed to pay a sparring partner $1.2 million to come and beat them up 35-10 at the Rose Bowl, like the Lobos – 15.5-point underdogs coming in – did Friday night.
UCLA isn’t supposed to be that sad.
But the second season of the DeShaun Foster era has started so dismally – the gutted little Bruins are 0-3, they’ve scored just 43 points and allowed 65 – it’s just a depressing sight.
A beautiful night in Pasadena, tarnished by truly terrible football. The young men in Bruins blue and gold staggering off the field afterwards dazed, confused. Jerry Neuheisel, assistant head coach and tight ends coach, running his hands through his blond hair, stunned.
The situation is so bleak.
So far, against one former Pac-12 foe (Utah) and two Mountain West Conference schools, UCLA has been utterly outclassed. And, yes, out-talented. Outpaced. Outed.
“It’s been a lot of little details we’ve got to clean up,” Bruins defensive lineman Gary Smith III said.
A lot. A million.
The devil is in the details, but not only.
It’s in the broader strokes too.
It’s actually everything, everywhere, all at once. All of it heaped upon Foster, who is now 5-10 as a head coach, and who said he’d accept the burden Friday night, not that he has a choice: “Everything that happens can fall on me. I’m the head coach. So it can fall on me.”
But it’s also, apparently, a lack of financial resources in this new college football free market, he said: “It wasn’t just you can get kids, you got to have a certain amount of money. It’s a whole lot of stuff that goes into acquisition.”
It’s a failure of marketing. Win and they’ll come, Foster said before the season, when he eschewed free promotion from local media – or maybe tried to hide the problems that would soon be plaguing the Bruins out in the open. A recipe for apathy, judging by the announced crowd – generously listed at 31,163 – at Friday’s game, where tickets were going for $6 (with fees) beforehand.
And it’s also a lack of inspiration, uncreative play-calling, surprising from former Indiana co-offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach Tino Sunseri and new QB Nico Iamaleava. Much more was expected from both men, including the Long Beach native through three games with three touchdowns and three interceptions and a 63.9% completion percentage.
It’s a frustrating lack of urgency and beguiling lack of discipline. Now habitually slow starts – UCLA has already trailed 20-0 twice and 14-0 once – compounded by chronically poor decision-making. Penalties on penalties on penalties, gracious hosts, UCLA’s 13 flags Friday gifted the Lobos 116 yards – running the season’s tally to 30 penalties for 275 yards.
“We have to stop shooting ourselves in the foot,” said Iamaleava, the high-profile transfer quarterback who left Tennessee after a contract dispute and signed in L.A. for significantly less – reportedly around $1.2 million, per On3.
Rich then, to hear Iamaleava tell us Friday night he wishes playing football didn’t feel like such a j-o-b: “We got to get back that just going out and having fun, man. This is a game as a little kid you love to play and I think a lot of … our group is treating this like a job.”
Sigh.
And, yes, this has been the easy part of the schedule. It’s going to get only worse.
Last season, the Bruins strung together three wins against Rutgers, Nebraska and Iowa – but that team resembled Chip Kelly’s decent-if-dissatisfying regime. Foster’s fellas are figuring it out on the fly – or trying to – and they’re about to run into some of the toughest competition in the nation.
Foster said Friday that the Bruins have dug themselves a deep hole: “Pretty low right now. I’ve been around this program for a long time and it’s just unfortunate, what’s going on right this moment.”
But it’s going to get much worse.
UCLA is about to be every Big Ten opponent’s get-right game. The Bruins have trainwrecks looming against No. 2 Penn State and No. 1 Ohio State. And going winless not only seems like a possibility, but like somewhat of a probability. Even the seemingly winnable conference contests – Northwestern on Sept. 27 and Maryland on Oct. 18 – surely aren’t sure things.
Not like Foster’s excusal will be. There are hot seats and there are inevitabilities, unhappy endings to would-be fairy tales.
However much room the first-time head coach’s runway is, it won’t be long enough to pull the Bruins excusal so lacking in discipline and urgency, talent and interest, inspiration and creativity, toughness and responsibility, everything you need to have even a chance at being even decent, competent or good in the Big Ten excusal out of their current nosedive.
The true-blue Bruin, who had great hopes of giving the program’s fans a few of those fun, memorable seasons that he’d been part of as a player, is responsible for this epic mess of a predicament, a losing proposition with a predictable ending. And honestly, it’s sad.
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