The final week of the college football regular season is often reserved for rivalry matchups.
UCLA, however, already played its crosstown showdown against USC on Saturday.
While the Bruins won’t be playing their main rival in Week 14, they’ll certainly be facing their biggest nemesis of the Jim Mora era.
Over the past two years, Stanford has continually stood in the path of UCLA’s goals. In all three of those games, UCLA has come up just short.
The Bruins had two chances in consecutive weeks in 2012 against Stanford, playing the Cardinal in the final regular season game and again in the Pac-12 title game.
Both times, Stanford outlasted UCLA.
In the Pac-12 title game, the Bruins lost on a missed 51-yard field goal by then-freshman kicker Ka’imi Fairbairn. The memory of that loss hasn’t been forgotten by anyone on the team – even during this year’s fall camp in San Bernardino, UCLA ended each practice by replicating that kick.
The next season, UCLA once more seemed up to the challenge to hang with Stanford until the end, going into halftime trailing just 3-0. But again, the Cardinal bested the Bruins in the second half, winning the game 24-10.
Though UCLA has proven itself to be among the best of the Pac-12 throughout Mora’s tenure, it has yet to prove it is among the elite, top-tier teams such as Oregon and Stanford.
Although this season may not change that – the Cardinal are mired in a down-year with just a 6-5 record – a win over Stanford could be a psychological breakthrough for the Bruins to prove they can best their biggest nuisance over the past two years.
To add to the drama, once again, Stanford is all that stands in the way of UCLA’s Pac-12 title dreams. For the Bruins to advance to the Pac-12 championship game against Oregon, they’ll need a win against Stanford. So this game becomes even more of a psychological battle, not just in shaking the Cardinal monkey off the Bruins’ back, but in shaking free of their cycle of self-inflicted problems.
Throughout this season, particularly in the early stages, UCLA’s biggest adversary has been itself. Its defensive struggles were a result of players trying to do too much and not sticking to their assignments. Frequent mental lapses caused the Pac-12 to pay a larger water bill, as the referees were forced to dirty their flags far too often.
Most notably, the Bruins admitted that the pressure of their preseason expectations got to them early in the season. The expectations have returned late in the year, but so far, UCLA has kept them from affecting its play.
Now, just one win away from the first part of their goal coming to fruition, facing a Cardinal team that is clearly not the dominant force they have been recently, the Bruins’ biggest challenge once again will be not letting the moment become too big for them.
The Bruins did that against the team wearing cardinal and gold on Saturday. Now it’s time for them to do it against the Cardinal.