Give Neuheisel a little time

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An old basketball friend of mine, gem of a guy, Bill Fitch, once said somewhat famously, since the line now appears on many lists of quotable quotes:

‘Sometimes you wake up in the morning and wish your parents had never met.’

Maybe Rick Neuheisel feels that way today.

So Ricky ... you’ve been back in Westwood for, like, 10 minutes ... the earnest but awful team you inherited from Karl Dorrell got run off the field in back-to-back games ... true, your team is giving off the odor of raw sewage, being outscored 90 to 10 or 900 to 10 or whatever it was ... but it’s not on you, no way, no how ... your predecessor left the cupboard as bare as the show open for the Emmys ... it’s literally the dawning of whatever kind of era you’re going to have as the head football coach at UCLA ...

OK, so those ads promising that you’re coming after USC to take away the town from the Trojans were as premature as a Bristol Palin pregnancy, but heck, this is L.A., it’s all sell and pizazz and image and bluster, anyway ... so taking it all into account, most especially the courtesy grace period you ought to be allowed, and still, they’re laying you out in the paper like Rey Maualuga on Pat Cowan ... treating you like a party pinata at an anger management class for serial killers ... and I have to say, the degree of anti-Ricky vitriol in these little diatribes surprised even the un-surprisable me.

Confessing right here my own status as a UCLA alum with occasional pangs of loyalty, and sharing that my heart is only 90% black from a lifetime in a cynical business like journalism, giving me a 10% edge on others, ripping Rick Neuheisel at this nascent stage of the game is so heartless, it’s like telling a poor old down-on-his-luck homeless man that Ralph’s really needs its shopping cart back.

Cono, Lucy...can’t we reasonably give Little Ricky at least a year or two to get his own recruits into Westwood before we trash him in the paper?

If by year three Pete Carroll is still looking at UCLA game film privately and laughing out loud, if Pete tells a crony that Dorrell was Vince Lombardi compared with Neuheisel, then go right ahead, have at him.

But by effectively holding Little Ricky’s Bruins to the standard set by that ridiculous behemoth of a dynasty across town, an outfit that would be running first right now in the NFC West, never mind the Pac-10 ... or putting it a different way, by being spoiled rotten by that standard, it puts Neuheisel in an impossibly untenable position.

Oh yeah, that’s right. The one he already signed on for when he took the job.

-- Ted Green

Ted Green is a former sportswriter for the L.A. Times and National Sports Daily, and currently senior sports producer for KTLA Prime News.