EL PASO, Texas “”mdash; After two years of embarrassing bowl
losses, questions about his leadership, and mediocre results on the
field, senior quarterback Drew Olson packed up his locker for the
last time, leaving UCLA just as he envisioned ““ better off
than he found it.
“I, we, accomplished our mission,” Olson said.
After two years of off-season mental torture after believing his
team left something on the football field, senior safety Jarrad
Page is approaching this off-season with something he hasn’t
hand since he was a freshman ““ peace of mind.
“We finally completed a season, finally,” Page
said.
After two years of bitter locker rooms and players screaming at
one another, senior offensive guard Robert Cleary paused at his
locker Friday afternoon and soaked up some unfamiliar sounds this
time of year ““ laughing, camaraderie, sounds of victory.
“People are talking, joking around and laughing, when last
year everyone was yelling in each other’s faces,”
Cleary said. “This is the best thing that could have
happened, no matter how it came or what it took.”
UCLA’s 50-38 victory over Northwestern at the 72nd annual
Vitalis Sun Bowl on Friday at Sun Bowl Stadium may not have been
pretty, and in fact was quite bizarre, but it provided the Bruins
everything that their previous two bowl games could not.
It ensured UCLA (10-2, 6-2 Pac-10) a 10-win season, the first
since 1998 and only the seventh in the 87-year history of the
program.
It ended a dubious recent bowl game history, which included
embarrassing losses at the not-so-prestigious Silicon Valley Bowl
and the Las Vegas Bowl, and delivered to UCLA coach Karl Dorrell
his first victory in the month of December.
But most importantly, Friday’s victory validated a season
in which the Bruins ascended from the level of mediocrity, and now
have a bowl game trophy with a permanent residence in the J.D.
Morgan Center to prove it.
Unlike the last two years, in which any growth UCLA exhibited
during the regular season was stunted in December, this
year’s Bruin team preserved that progress on Friday,
delivering to next year’s team some long-awaited
momentum.
“The program is definitely in better hands,” senior
linebacker Spencer Havner said. “And that’s the only
thing I wanted all year, to bring some respect back to
us.”
“They’ve done a great job getting the respect level
back in the program,” Dorrell said. “Getting off the
heels of a 6-6 season the previous year is a great accomplishment
and a step forward.”
The Bruins just ended up taking a roundabout way of getting
there.
In the previous 11 games, UCLA had come to rely heavily on
Olson, tight end Marcedes Lewis and running back Maurice Drew.
The trio reserved their worst collective performance for
Friday’s bowl game.
After having thrown only three interceptions in 354 passes this
season, Olson threw three interceptions in four passes in the first
quarter alone, the last of which Northwestern’s Nick Roach
ran back for a 35-yard touchdown to give the Wildcats a 22-0 lead.
The most points Northwestern (7-5, 5-3 Big 10) had scored in the
first quarter this season before Friday was 10.
“It seemed like just a fluke,” Olson said.
“But I wasn’t worried.”
Nor was Olson worried that Lewis caught Dorrell by surprise with
a bucket of Gatorade just as many times as he hauled in a reception
on Friday (once), which was on a two-point conversion.
And even with Drew succumbing to a left shoulder injury on a
kickoff return midway through the first quarter, running backs
Chris Markey and Kahlil Bell more than admirably assumed command of
the Bruins’ rushing attack. The duo combined for 294 of a
team season-high 310 rushing yards while punching it into the
endzone twice, and were rewarded for their efforts by being named
Co-Most Valuable Players.
“They did a great job,” Drew said. “They went
out there and took it upon themselves (to get us back).”
Though next year’s media guide will confirm that
Friday’s 22-point comeback was the largest deficit the Bruins
had to overcome this season, it didn’t have the same emotion
of UCLA’s four other fourth-quarter comebacks.
Perhaps that’s because this comeback was two quarters too
early, as theBruins took a 29-22 advantage into halftime and never
yielded the lead back to Northwestern.
“That’s good that it came early,” Olson said.
“We didn’t want to wait. That was the beauty of it. I
hate coming back, but the way we responded, that’s what makes
this one so much better.”
The victory was finally sealed when sophomore receiver Brandon
Breazell returned an onside kick 42 yards for a touchdown with 2:24
remaining in the game.
He sealed it again with 18 seconds left when he returned another
onside kick for a touchdown, this time scampering 45 yards past a
bumbling and stumbling Northwestern special teams unit.
“That was crazy,” Page said. “It was the exact
same play. I’ve never seen that before.”
Such an ending was befitting for a game that the Sun Bowl had
never seen before in its 72-year history, a game that broke as many
Sun Bowl records as dropped balls by Wildcat receivers, which is to
say, many.
UCLA and Northwestern combined to break the record for most
first-quarter points combined (29), most first-half points combined
(51), most first downs combined (57), and most points combined
(88).
The Bruins also did some individual rearranging of the record
book, with Olson tying the Sun Bowl record with three touchdown
passes, scoring the most points (50) and recording the largest
comeback (22) in the bowl game’s history.
But the single-game comeback may pale in comparison to the
turnaround UCLA achieved this season.
Since the 66-19 debacle at USC back on Dec. 3, Dorrell had
stressed to his team it still had the potential to finish the
season on a positive note, to continue to generate the momentum it
had for the better part of the 2005 season.
But in order to do so, according to players, it was required the
Bruins win this game.
“This game showed that guys will want to be here, and
that’s the mentality that guys have bought into this year,
that they want to be around,” Cleary said. “We’ve
gotten rid of the guys that don’t want to be here. You had
some guys that didn’t want to be here, and now they’re
gone. We have some guys that want to be here now.”
Guys who enter next season with a feeling that has been absent
from the program the last two seasons ““ as winners.
“There’s a lot of things the seniors wish we could
have done in our time here, but at least we took a program that was
on the downside and turned it up, and it’s cool to be sitting
here on the upswing,” Cleary said.
“This is the last game I’ll ever get to play in. I
went out a winner, and now I get to tell my kids that.”