It looks like the UCLA football team will finish another year looking up. Another season will pass with the Bruins still beneath the Pac-10 elite, and the team will begin yet another offseason thinking about the steps it must take to reach that level.
If that holds true, this season will punctuate a decade of what-ifs, near misses and heartbreak for the Bruin football team.
In the past nine seasons, the UCLA football team has beaten rival USC once, and when the two teams meet Dec. 6 at the Rose Bowl, the Trojans will almost certainly be heavy favorites.
During that same span, the Bruins have finished as one of the top three teams in the Pac-10 only once, and won just two bowl games. UCLA hired a new athletic director in 2002 and has switched football coaches twice since.
The players and coaches of the 1998 football team experienced a different era.
That team, the last great Bruin team, won 20 consecutive games. Coached by Bob Toledo, UCLA debuted as the top-ranked team in the first ever BCS rankings. The offense moved with astonishing precision and confidence, led by its hero of a quarterback, Cade McNown. Throughout the win streak, the defense always seemed to step up when it mattered most.
And before every matchup with USC, the Bruins simply knew they would win. They had beaten the Trojans in seven straight seasons. A win in 1998 pushed the streak to eight.
“It’s funny,” former wide receiver Danny Farmer said. “At that time, we had beaten USC eight times in a row, and those weren’t really the big games. … USC wasn’t our biggest rival. We beat them every year, and we expected to beat them every year. When we won those games, the feeling was almost like, “˜OK, we did our job and beat a team we should have beaten.'”
The streak starts
The magic of the 1998 Bruin team started to appear in 1997, when the win streak began.
The team started the 1997 season with two close losses to Washington State and Tennessee, but its confidence did not waver.
“We knew we had a very good team ““ even though we had lost the first two games,” former defensive assistant Bob Field said. “I think our team was still very confident that we would win the next week. And we did.”
A week after the loss to Tennessee, the Bruins traveled to Texas and demolished a highly ranked Longhorn team, 66-3.
That’s when the team’s ascension began.
The Bruins went on to win their next nine games and claim the Pac-10 Conference crown. They climbed to No. 5 in the final Associated Press poll, their best finish since 1982.
The team carried that momentum into the 1998 season.
“The core of that offense was older and had been playing for a long time together,” McNown said. “We were friends on and off the field, very close. We had developed a very strong bond, and a lot of trust.”
The Bruins raced through the first month of the 1998 season, with wins against Texas, Houston, Washington State and Arizona.
That fall was a rare moment in the history of UCLA athletics ““ the football team dominated while the basketball team, in its first few years under new coach Steve Lavin, was only average.
And with each win, the campus’s football frenzy grew.
“It was just a great feeling on campus,” former linebacker Ryan Nece said. “When I first got there, students didn’t really know a lot about football, or they didn’t know who the players were. But you start winning, and you have a lot of people rooting for you and a lot more people at the Rose Bowl, and that’s an exciting place.”
The Bruins’ fifth game, against Oregon, encapsulated that feeling of excitement.
A crowd of 75,367 fans packed into the Rose Bowl to watch the marquee matchup. Oregon turned to its star tailback, Reuben Droughns, while the Bruins leaned on McNown.
UCLA built a 17-point lead in the first half, only to see it slip away in the third and fourth quarters. Late in the fourth, Droughns fumbled and the Bruins recovered. The score was tied at 31.
McNown found Farmer on the very next play with a soaring, 60-yard rainbow, to put the Bruins ahead 38-31.
“It was two really, really good teams,” Farmer said. “I look back and just remember how amazing that game was. It was just fun to be a part of.”
Oregon fought back again, but the Bruins eventually won in thrilling fashion when Chris Sailer kicked a game-winning field goal in overtime to finally end the battle, 41-38.
After the game, Toledo told a Daily Bruin reporter that his team deserved two victories.
That game launched UCLA into the national picture and McNown to the front of the race for the Heisman Trophy. He finished with 395 yards and three touchdowns.
McNown’s resilience was even more remarkable.
He contracted a stomach sickness before the game, and at one point vomited at midfield.
That week, Sports Illustrated published a two-page photo of the moment, with McNown leaned over throwing up during a stoppage in play.
It became a sort of sensation for young Bruin fans. For the next few weeks, McNown was bombarded with autograph requests for the photo. At first he refused ““ it seemed like it was in poor taste to sign such a picture. But as the procession of adoring fans continued, McNown started to sign.
Beneath his name, he wrote, “Leave it all on the field.”
The stage is set
As the season wore on, the Bruins inched closer and closer to a national title.
Only one Bruin team had finished its season undefeated, and that came in 1954 when UCLA won its only football title.
With each week, that chance for that brilliance seemed more and more real to Bruin fans.
The team just kept pushing.
“You really can’t focus on what you just did,” Field said. “You’re scrambling and you’re working long days to get ready for the next game. … You have to file it away because you’re getting ready for the next test.”
It wasn’t always smooth or easy, but the Bruins kept passing each test.
After Oregon, UCLA claimed close victories against Stanford and California.
“When you talk about big-time college football, our campus at that time was right at center stage,” former linebacker Ramogi Huma said.
The Bruins punctuated the Pac-10 season with another victory over USC ““ their eighth straight.
Compared to many of the Pac-10 battles the Bruins had faced that season, it was a quick and easy 34-17 win.
“We did it eight years in a row,” former linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo said. “We didn’t know anything different than to beat those guys.”
The USC win was the twentieth consecutive victory for the Bruins, dating all the way back to that Texas game the year before.
All that winning produced a rare, powerful bond.
“Getting into the huddle with those guys, we just had such chemistry that we knew we could move the ball and score at any time,” Farmer said. “It was such a fun experience to be around guys who had so much confidence, but still had the willingness to sacrifice for each other.
“We all knew that we could only do it together.”
TOMORROW: An in-depth look at the final game of the Bruins’ 1998 season, at Miami, when it all fell apart.