_50-0 doesn’t reflect rivalry_

During night games at the Coliseum, when the sky is clear, the videoboard is illuminated brightly enough that planes making their descent into LAX are within viewing distance. Passengers can look out the window beyond the wing and see the score.

I’ve seen it before, and it makes for quite the “Welcome to Los Angeles” doormat.

Conditions were perfect Saturday night ““ clear, dark ““ so I hope there was plenty of air traffic. At the end of the day, the more witnesses the better.

When the allegorical hearing for coach Rick Neuheisel’s job is held, I want to be able to call passenger Joe Schmoe from Continental flight 342, and passenger Alicia Pluve from Lufthansa flight 17 to the witness stand.

50-0? Yeah, everybody saw that.

It was one of those games where the details don’t even end up mattering all that much. Sure, USC quarterback Matt Barkley put up gaudy numbers. Even Kevin Prince had, statistically, one of his more productive passing games. Usually, there’s some silver lining to be found in the numbers. Here, though, only one thing matters.

50-0 just has some mathematical elegance to it, some perverse poetry. It’s not 46-3, or 58-17. Those games are blowouts, but 50-0 is an iconic scoreline, even more so than the 59-0 drubbing that BYU laid on UCLA in 2008. It’s difficult to explain.

What isn’t difficult to explain is the fact that it’s ridiculous that we’re comparing a 50-0 defeat to a 59-0 defeat. The most demoralizing question of the Rick Neuheisel era used to be: “How can a program like UCLA get humiliated that badly by a Mountain West team?” Now, that question is: “How can a program like UCLA get humiliated that badly in a rivalry game?”

Forget for a moment that these are your Pac-12 South champion UCLA Bruins, although that fact only makes this loss taste all the more bitter on the way down. It’s gallows humor.

First and foremost, you have to take some measure of pride in facing your rival, especially when the two programs are as hostile to each other as UCLA and USC. Sure, the Trojans are loaded and have an eons-better quarterback, but their athletes are not 50 points better than the Bruins’. Not by a long shot.

The funny thing is, the final season of Rick Neuheisel’s run at UCLA ““ hard to fathom any other option at this point ““ unfolded pretty much as expected. Lots of ups and downs, a number of highs and plenty of lows. A middling final record became inevitable and bowl eligibility was obtained near the end of the season.

That, like so many past years, left the USC game as the final piece of the puzzle. No, the UCLA fan base is not satisfied by a trip to the EagleBank Bowl, or the Las Vegas Bowl or the Manute Bowl. The real ebb and flow of this program is charted by where the rivalry with “˜SC currently stands, and that fact drags UCLA down to a whole new depth.

Fact of the matter is, as long as Neuheisel is at the helm, this can no longer be considered a rivalry. A rivalry implies that there is always enough at stake for both teams to play with pride and determination, and 50-0 does not reflect that.

Upon his hiring, Neuheisel declared that the football monopoly in Los Angeles was over. I think we can all agree that that’s true: the Trojans weren’t playing Monopoly with the Bruins on Saturday, they were playing Bop It.

The frustrating thing is, UCLA has a week to prepare for the Pac-12 championship game against Oregon, a week in which they’ll try to hastily move on from the USC loss and try to devise a gameplan to slow the Ducks.

But don’t let 50-0 be forgotten. The world saw it; its citizens gazed down on the Coliseum from above and witnessed the destruction of a team and its coach, on a clear night soon to be obscured by the smoke from the firing squad.

If you prefer Trivial Pursuit to Football Monopoly, email Eshoff at reshoff@media.ucla.edu.

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