Updated at 9:50 a.m. Sept. 12
The UCLA football team came into its 2010 home opener against Stanford with a shopping list of things it hoped to improve after a narrow loss to Kansas State to start the season.
By the end of the game on Sept. 11, the Bruins’ list could have filled a phonebook.
UCLA (0-2, 0-1 Pac-10) only got inside Stanford’s 20-yard line once as the Cardinal (2-0, 1-0) ran away with a 35-0 victory in the first game of the conference season for both teams.
The Bruins could not get anything started with the ball in their hands. Rick Neuheisel called it “an offensive disaster.” UCLA had not been shut out at the Rose Bowl since the 1999 season.
“Of course it’s going to be disappointing to some extent, but a lot of us guys work really hard and you never imagine an outcome like this,” redshirt junior return man Josh Smith said. “The worst part is, we know we’re a whole lot better than what’s displayed out there.”
Bruin redshirt sophomore quarterback Kevin Prince had been limited in practice the week leading up to the game with the same strained oblique muscle that kept him out of much of the team’s fall camp. The rust seemed to show as Prince threw for just 39 yards with an interception in three quarters before being lifted for his backup, sophomore Richard Brehaut.
However, Prince’s counterpart, Stanford’s redshirt sophomore quarterback Andrew Luck, commanded his offense and gave the UCLA defense fits with his unexpected first-down scrambles. After a breakout season last year, Luck is being considered as one of the nation’s top pro prospects at the position. Neuheisel admitted that the quarterback was “as advertised.””¨
Luck had 151 yards through the air for two touchdowns, complemented by a handful of heads-up rushes for a career-high 63 yards on the ground.
“It was really frustrating by the end of the game, because it seemed like it was just a methodical gain of points,” junior safety Tony Dye said. “It was like every time I looked up, (their score) kept going up.”
The UCLA run defense that looked wholly overmatched in its debut last week against Kansas State’s Daniel Thomas still appeared to be over its head. Stanford had 211 yards rushing even though its most prolific offensive threat from a year ago, running back Toby Gerhart, left for the NFL after last season.”¨
For the second straight week, Neuheisel admitted that his defensive unit might have been too tired to keep up. “We can’t leave the defense out on the field as much as we have in each of the first two weeks.”
In the first half, the UCLA offense rarely even entered field goal territory, and when it did, it shot itself in the foot before it could put anything on the scoreboard.
The Cardinal gave the Bruins favorable position for what looked like the final drive of the half after a punt return interference call put UCLA on Stanford’s 38-yard line. When Prince lofted a deep ball down the sideline right into the hands of junior tight end Cory Harkey, the Rose Bowl crowd anticipated it might finally have reason to get involved, but Harkey could not hold onto it and the pass fell incomplete. A false start and another incomplete pass to Harkey secured the scoring drought once again.
“It’s more frustrating than you know,” Neuheisel said of the missed scoring opportunities. “We didn’t have enough crispness in our game to merit the ability to play at this level.”
Going just 1-for-9 in third-down conversions certainly did not help. As if it wasn’t clear enough that things were going badly for UCLA, the Bruins’ lights-out redshirt senior kicker Kai Forbath missed a 49-yard attempt that would have been the team’s first points of the night. Forbath had made his previous 40 attempts from less than 50 yards.
“¨Already two losses in the hole to start the season, the Bruins will not have much time to recover. UCLA’s next two opponents, Houston and No. 5 Texas, have each won their first two games by at least 17 points.”¨
“It gets here faster than you think,” Smith said. “It’s all going downhill really fast and there’s a lot of mistakes that need to be corrected on the fly.
“¨”Man, we’ve just got to get better fast.”