Glory days of our football season seem far removed

  Christina Teller Teller is crossing her
fingers for a Bruin Crucial.com Humanitarian Bowl. E-mail her at
[email protected].
Click Here for more articles by Christina Teller

Ah, those were the days. When words like
“decisively” and “attack” were being used
in headlines describing a Bruin football victory.

The Bruin bandwagon was beginning to reach capacity, and
UCLA’s conference and home-opener was scheduled for Sept. 15
against Arizona State.

It was early in the season, and the Bruins had two hash marks in
the win column. UCLA was only ranked No. 14, but after beating
Alabama 20-17 on Sept. 1 and “canning” Kansas 41-17 on
Sept. 8, the Bruins were in good shape.

The lowly Sun Devils were a deceiving 1-0 at that point, and it
really wasn’t a question as to whether or not the Bruins
would win ““ but by how much.

Oh, how things change.

Twelve weeks later, it doesn’t even take a thousand words
to describe the kind of picture that the Bruins have been painting
in their last few outings.

In fact, that picture can be summed up with five letters:
C-H-O-K-E.

UCLA has gone from national-championship hopefuls to just hoping
to get into a bowl, while ASU has pretty much played up to par in
its 2001 campaign. But the thing is, the Bruins are just two wins
away from that very level.

Looking back just a few weeks, it feels like it was another
season all together.

Back then, DeShaun Foster was good for a couple hundred yards.
Heck, he was even part of the team.

Now, Manuel White and Akil Harris are filling in for Foster. The
two have combined for 145 yards in the last two games, completing
not even half of Foster’s yardage against Washington
alone.

And that’s just the beginning.

The barely-bowl eligible Bruins are trying to eke out their
seventh win for the season and maintain possession of sixth
place.

Remember the days when the Bruins were ranked higher than sixth
in the nation?

So what can you expect from this weekend’s game?

UCLA dropped more than just the ball against respectable
conference-opponents Stanford, Washington State and Oregon, and
didn’t do much of anything to avoid a goose egg against USC.
So in short, there’s no telling what will happen this
weekend.

Maybe lowered expectations will help UCLA focus. Maybe going up
against a team with two conference wins will take some of the
pressure off.

The game against USC didn’t really mean anything. OK, so
the pride of Los Angeles was on the line, as well as a
Christmas-break trip to Las Vegas, but it’s not like USC
ruined the Bruins’ season.

That started happening when the Bruin defense forgot to show up
for the first half of the game against Stanford.

But what hurts most about facing ASU this weekend is that the
UCLA football team’s position isn’t all that different
than the Sun Devils at this point in the season.

They both trampled Oregon State, but UCLA and ASU lost to
Stanford, Washington State, Oregon and USC.

Neither team has won since Oct. 20, when UCLA beat Cal 56-17 and
ASU beat Oregon State.

Ouch.

In recent headlines, the Bruins’ season has been equated
with the idea of having been “blown away” and gone
“horribly wrong.”

An earlier matchup with the Sun Devils wouldn’t have
changed the course of UCLA’s season, but it may have been
nice for the team to have cut their losses after USC and just
called it a season.