In his three-plus years in Westwood, linebacker Spencer Havner
has never felt this good about UCLA football.
Neither has quarterback Drew Olson, for that matter.
“It’s the best three-game stretch since I’ve
been here,” Olson said.
But when UCLA, off to its best start in four years, puts its
perfect record and a surge of momentum on the line when conference
doormat Washington comes to the Rose Bowl on Saturday, the Bruins
will embrace past lessons of overconfidence and the poor results
that followed.
“The only year we started off better was in 2001 and that
was a whole different team with different character,” said
Havner, referring to a Bob Toledo-coached Bruin team that started
6-0 and went on to lose its next four games.
“I’d like to think that we have better character now
with a whole different coaching regime to keep things positive and
stay ultra-focused one week at a time.”
Unafraid of a letdown nearly two weeks after a decisive 41-24
victory over Oklahoma, the Bruins enter their showdown with
Washington not overly cocky, but as confident as any point during
the last two seasons.
And why shouldn’t they be?
Of the last eight meetings between the two teams, UCLA (3-0) has
walked away the victor in seven of those games, including the last
four.
The Huskies (1-3), whose trip to the Rose Bowl is their first
road game of the season, have lost 13 of their last 15 games and
are again spiraling toward the basement of the Pac-10
standings.
And the Bruins’ current national ranking, 20th in The
Associated Press poll, is the highest-such standing for a UCLA team
in nearly three years.
“It’s fun to see a little 20 by our name,
that’s all I can say,” Havner said.
“It’s nice to see the respect.”
Still, that doesn’t mean the Bruins are satisfied. In
fact, they’re far from it.
While the numbers suggest that Saturday’s showdown at the
Rose Bowl is an apparent mismatch, recent history provides UCLA
with a much more cautionary tale.
The last five times the Bruins have entered a game ranked 20th
or higher in the country, they’ve lost.
And for all the positive steps taken by UCLA in the last two
years under coach Karl Dorrell, there have also been regressions,
most notably the team’s two bowl losses to Fresno State and
Wyoming and an embarrassing loss to Washington State at home last
season.
So even though UCLA has had two long weeks to soak up all of the
praise and attention thrown its way after beating Oklahoma, the
Bruins still enter this weekend the same way they do every
Saturday: wary of their opponent.
“We’re going to stay hungry now, because the hunger
wasn’t really there before (in past seasons),” running
back Maurice Drew said.
“We cannot afford another slip-up like Washington State or
Wyoming (last year),” sophomore wide receiver Marcus Everett
said.
“We have got to take care of business.”
Come this Saturday, all that might translate to be is handing
the ball off to Drew.
It was only a little over a year ago that the UCLA junior
running back made bystanders of Washington’s defenders in
Seattle en route to a 37-31 Bruin victory, rushing for an
astounding 322 yards and scoring five touchdowns, both school
records for a single game.
This time around, Drew and Dorrell expect the Huskies to learn
from that game and shrink up the freeway-sized running lanes he
scampered through a season ago.
“I’m sure they want some vindication for what
happened a year ago,” Dorrell said.
“If anything, they’re going to stop the run because
we ran on them so much last year,” Drew said.
If that’s the case, UCLA’s receivers, a group
without its senior leader Junior Taylor who will miss the remainder
of the season with a torn ACL he suffered against Oklahoma, could
be expected to carry the offense on Saturday.
Against an opponent like Washington, it appears the UCLA
offense, the third-most prolific in the nation (49 points per
game), will find little in the form of resistance.
While the Huskies have professed there is a different attitude
surrounding the program under first-year coach Tyrone Willingham,
the team’s results so far during the 2005 season are
strikingly similar to last year’s disaster of a season, one
in which the Huskies went 1-10.
Washington comes into Saturday’s contest on the heels of a
36-17 loss to Notre Dame in which the team looked improved, but
still lost for the third time in its first four games.
“They have looked a lot better from their first game until
their last game,” Dorrell said.
Still, the Huskies lay claim to the Pac-10’s least
productive scoring offense (21 points per game) and is last in the
conference in total defense, surrendering an average of 432 yards
per game to their opponents.
Yet, even though it appears Washington presents the Bruins with
the most beneficial conference match-up possible to open up their
Pac-10 schedule, the Bruins aren’t buying it.
The Bruins are preparing for the Huskies as if they were facing
their crosstown rivals and defending champions, the Trojans,
because they’re convinced that whoever the opponent is, it
will inevitably come down to what the men wearing UCLA helmets do
on the football field.
“It’s absolutely about us doing what we need to
do,” offensive coordinator Tom Cable said.
“It has nothing to do with anything anyone else is
doing.”
With reports from Bryan Chu and Sagar Parikh, Bruin Sports
senior staff.