Heating up: UCLA football heads to the desert for Arizona showdown

Little was left to the imagination during UCLA and Arizona’s previous two meetings on the football field.

One October night in 2011, a hapless Arizona team explosively unraveled the veneer of mediocrity surrounding what had been a 3-3 UCLA squad. The Wildcats came into the nationally televised meeting losers of 10 straight games against Football Bowl Subdivision teams, and left owners of a 48-12 mauling of the Bruins.

Attention was drawn away from a UCLA team trailing 42-7 seconds before halftime by a streaker posing as a referee. The Bruins’ respite from attention would be all too brief, however. A TV camera would pan from the detained hooligan to reveal a sideline-clearing brawl that resulted in 10 athletes getting suspended for at least a game.

Looking back at the incident, senior Jordan Zumwalt thought of the streaker as supplying perhaps his one good memory from the fourth-worst loss in the Rick Neuheisel era.

“Shoot, man, that’s part of sports. I personally think it’s funny when somebody comes running on the field,” said Zumwalt, an inside linebacker. “It’s entertainment. It’s a bunch of idiots.”

A season later, Arizona found itself as little more than entertainment for then-No. 25 UCLA. The Bruins exposed and blew the No. 24 Wildcats, hot off of a 3-point win against No. 10 USC, right out of the top 25 with a 66-10 victory in front of a homecoming crowd at the Rose Bowl.

UCLA hits the road for Tucson, Ariz., this weekend for another game in a stretch run that, for both teams, leaves little room for error. With just four games remaining, UCLA, Arizona and USC trail Arizona State by a single game apiece in the race for the Pac-12 South’s conference title game spot.

The script for Saturday’s nationally televised match between 6-2 teams reads similarly to last year’s version. Both squads are right in the hunt for a divisional title, with the homecoming team trying to bounce back from an embarrassing loss the previous year against a ranked opponent.

According to Arizona coach Rich Rodriguez, the defensive personnel that UCLA lit up for 42 first-half points is even largely the same, with improvements coming from another year of playing in his system. Mora acknowledged the improvement of Arizona’s defensive unit by describing it as proud and swarming as a team.

Meanwhile, new starters re-energize more than half of UCLA’s starting defensive spots. Inexperience has hardly hindered the Bruins, especially in containing essentially all of the running quarterbacks the team has played this season: UCLA has not surrendered more than 51 rushing yards to passers since opening the season against Nevada.

Arizona senior quarterback BJ Denker possesses the speed to make UCLA pay for over-committing to fakes to star junior running back Ka’Deem Carey, but Denker has completed only 58 percent of his passes this year, and owns more touchdown runs than scoring passes. Though Denker is more inclined to the run, redshirt senior safety Brandon Sermons said that UCLA will, more often than not, line up in the more pass-oriented nickel package, which features five defensive backs and puts the cornerback on outside receivers, in combating Arizona’s spread attack.

Escaping the road game with a win will likely come down to shutting down Carey. Arizona helped UCLA accomplish the task last year by only giving Carey two touches, a carry and a catch, before falling into a 21-0 deficit that Mora said forced the Wildcats to go away from their running strength. Arizona figures to lean on Carey much more this time around, as UCLA gave up more than 300 yards on the ground to Oregon, the only team the Bruins have played that ranks higher than Arizona in rushing yards per game.

Despite the high stakes of each remaining game and the program’s eventful recent history with Arizona, Mora finds no difficulty in keeping a winning memory separate from game-time preparation. His team’s work in the film room zeroes in on technique and formation changes, without ever paying mind to the score.

“You look at it from a play-by-play, schematic matter. You’re never looking at the whole, ever,” Mora said.

Even on the field, the UCLA coach believes that any notions of revenge naturally handle themselves over the course of a match, with the game’s narrative stripped down to what happens on the field.

“Once the ball’s kicked off and you start playing, it’s about executing,” Mora said. “… A lot of (the emotional factor) … kind of dissipates and just turns back into football.”