Column: Rosen sets the bar high for himself as big game against Stanford approaches

Quarterback Josh Rosen’s glum expression Saturday night suggested that he had just played the worst game of his life, not that he had passed for 307 yards — the eighth 300-yard game of his career — and had thrown for two touchdowns in UCLA’s 17-14 victory over BYU at LaVell Edwards Stadium.

The numbers he posted Saturday, though impressive, meant nothing to him. The sophomore from Manhattan Beach moved to ninth on the Bruins’ all-time passing yards list (4,585), eighth in career completions (367) and 10th in career total offense (4,578) in addition to ranking third on the school list in 200-yard passing games.

Instead of reflecting on the passes that connected in a game that improved UCLA’s record to 2-1, he bemoaned the chances he missed during a tentative first-half performance.

“I don’t care,” he said. “I just need to execute in the key moments of the game and it doesn’t just mean the fourth quarter, it means getting rolling in the first and second quarters. I’ve just got to play better. It gets real frustrating. After A&M I was getting a lot better. UNLV was a productive game, and to take a step back like this is really frustrating.”

A 26-for-40, 307-yard, two-touchdown game is a step back?

To Rosen it was.

“Absolutely. I’m not just going off of stats — touchdowns, picks, whatever,” he said. “It’s going on film, how many coaching points there are in the game. If I go 10 for 10 for 80 yards and no touchdowns and that’s what I needed to do, I consider that more successful than going 25 for 50 for 350, 400 yards and three touchdowns, two picks.

“It’s all relative. I wasn’t executing what I was asked to do today, and it’s really frustrating because the coaches are trying to get on you and you know that they’re just trying to help you out.”

Not even the early third-quarter drive in which he converted three consecutive third-down attempts — the Bruins’ first third-down conversions of the game — was enough to satisfy him. The 10-play, 76-yard drive featured third-down passes of 16 yards to Kenneth Walker III, eight yards to Jordan Lasley, and 33 yards to Darren Andrews for the touchdown that gave the Bruins a 17-0 lead after the successful extra point.

He didn’t change anything, he said. Certainly, he didn’t change his demands of himself.

“It was just back to form. That’s how I should be playing every drive. It’s not I was relieved or anything after that. It’s just the expectation. That’s the standard,” he said.

“It’s not what I do on those plays. It’s what I don’t do on the others. I’m just not throwing it to them, it’s pretty simple. I mean, guys are open.”

Though it’s admirable that Rosen constantly pushes himself to be better and settles for nothing less than unbending excellence, this is an imperfect game and things will go wrong. Receivers won’t be where they’re supposed to be. Opponents will play well, though he said the Cougars didn’t do anything surprising or exceptional Saturday to throw him off his game.

“They actually pressured a lot less than we thought. They’re a pretty heavy zone-pressure team, and we didn’t see very much of it,” he said. “They brought some stuff and we went empty, but nothing in particular. They actually were a little more basic than we thought, and I think they were actually probably getting ready for me to shred them on the passing attack but it didn’t end up happening.”

It also might not be wise for him to continually beat himself up to the point where he can’t enjoy what he has done and what he might accomplish. Despite the continued absence of a running game, Rosen did more than enough to allow UCLA to take a winning record into its Pacific-12 opener against Stanford next Saturday, and that’s what mattered most.

“Josh has such high expectations for himself that sometimes he lets that get the best of him, and he has to realize that he’s not going to play a perfect game,” Coach Jim Mora said. “He just has to play up to his ability level and capabilities, and I think that at halftime he settled down a little bit. He took a deep breath, he regathered his composure and came out and lightened the load a little bit on himself.”

Lightened the load? Unlikely. Maybe he handled it better, another step toward achieving that so-far elusive perfection. “He’s maturing nicely,” offensive coordinator Kennedy Polamalu said of Rosen’s second-half effort Saturday.

In the end, even Rosen found reason for optimism. The inability to see the field that frustrated him Saturday and led him to miss some open receivers is curable, or so he believes. “It’s nothing I’ve really got to like completely revamp when you get back on Monday,” he said. “It’s just making simple corrections.”

And simply never vying for anything less than perfection.

helene.elliott@latimes.com

Follow Helene Elliott on Twitter @helenenohelen