After speaking with several UCLA fans and colleagues before Saturday’s game against Washington State, I almost fell into the forbidden trap of overlooking an opponent.
I almost fell.
You see, with the Bruins’ win over Texas last week, UCLA football fans were under the impression that their team had finally turned the corner.
And with the lowly Cougars coming into town, this was supposed to be the week that the Bruins dominated all facets of the game, embarrassing the Cougars and propelling themselves to the brink of the top 25.
So with about seven minutes left to go in the third quarter, Washington State leading 28-20, I began to massage my chin hairs in a very contemplative manner.
“UCLA isn’t doing too well.”
The Bruins went on to tie the game at the end of the third and scored two more touchdowns in the fourth quarter to seal the victory, but I still couldn’t get over how close the game actually was.
It seems as if the Bruins’ players decided to turn it up a notch in the game’s final quarter. And honestly, I was impressed by their two touchdown drives in the fourth and their defensive stops against a Cougar offense that marched up and down the field for three quarters.
But it was Washington State that marched up and down the field for three quarters. The very same team that went winless in the Pac-10 last year. The Bruins’ defense that arrived in Austin a week earlier is not the same defense that showed up this past weekend in Pasadena.
For a moment, I thought that Stanford and WSU had exchanged quarterbacks. Cougars quarterback Jeff Tuel effectively mastered several touchdown drives and ended the game with 311 yards passing and two touchdowns, and looked very much like Stanford’s star quarterback, Andrew Luck. In addition, he nearly gave his team a lead in the fourth on a quarterback scramble that was ruled just short of the goal line.
The Bruins’ rushing offense looked spectacular once again, amassing a whopping 437 rushing yards, 216 of which belonged to Johnathan Franklin, who has starred for the UCLA offense in all three UCLA wins. Derrick Coleman added 185 yards on the ground and three touchdowns.
But they were playing Washington State.
Richard Brehaut filled in for an injured Kevin Prince and, surprisingly, made the passing game look respectable. Throwing for more than 100 yards and completing just more than 50 percent of his passing attempts is fantastic for a UCLA team that has been abysmal through the air.
But it was playing Washington State.
The Bruins are preparing to hit the most difficult stretch in their Pac-10 schedule. They play Cal this weekend, followed by No. 3 Oregon, No. 9 Arizona and Oregon State in the next three weeks, and the defensive performance that Neuheisel’s squad had against WSU can’t be one he was excited about.
The 28 points that the Cougars scored against UCLA was a season-high. The 21 first downs the Cougars racked up was a season-high. The eight third-down conversions were also a season-high. The 311 passing yards Jeff Tuel threw for was the first 300-yard passing game for the Cougars all season.
And in the fourth quarter, when the Cougars went scoreless, they still had their opportunities to score. On their first drive, they were stopped on the one-yard line. On drive two, the Cougars missed a 45-yard field goal.
In a nutshell, for the first time this season, a UCLA win came via the offense, which is fine.
But the Bruins were playing Washington State.
As well as the Bruins are rushing, and they’re rushing well, it’s going to be hard to put up nearly 500 on the ground once again.
With that said, the defensive unit that showed up in Austin will need to be on display for them to be successful.
We’ve seen that the defense has the ability to spearhead an upset, and the Bruins will have plenty of chances to pull off another one in the upcoming weeks.
We will soon see if UCLA actually has a chance to make a push for a high Pac-10 finish, or if its three wins have been flukes.
Contender or pretender?
At this point, I’m not sure which is true.