There Is No Mystery: UCLA Simply Is Not as Good as Arizona St., 16-9

The mystery is over.

UCLA, which had wondered how good a football team it is, wonders no longer.

Now, the Bruins are secure in the knowledge that, at this moment, they’re pretty bad.

For the fifth consecutive year, UCLA failed to win its Pacific 10 opener. This could mean the Bruins are in for a very long season, although recent UCLA history indicates something else.

While Saturday’s 16-9 loss to Arizona State was still ringing in their ears, the Bruins were busy throwing their helmets into the ring as true contenders for the Rose Bowl game Jan. 1.

“This isn’t anything new,” safety Craig Rutledge said. “But it doesn’t get any easier, either.”

Instead, the Bruins had better get better, and quickly. Some history may be on their side, but this time the odds hardly seem stacked in their favor.

Despite an 0-3-2 record in their last five Pac-10 openers, the Bruins have had three New Year’s dates in the Rose Bowl, so it seems that UCLA likes to do things backward.

That is the direction the Bruins took for much of the second half Saturday. Perhaps they were just getting in some practice, all the while plotting a course for success by first visiting disaster.

In any event, the fact remains that before 51,533 fans at the Rose Bowl, UCLA lost to Arizona State for the first time ever. And if that isn’t hard enough to take, the Bruins say now that they have no choice except to beat Arizona next Saturday or the Pac-10 chase will probably be over for them, just two games into the conference schedule.

“As good as the conference is this year, you won’t win it with two losses,” Rutledge said.

If so, the Bruins, who are 2-2 overall, got halfway to elimination with a stunningly inept offense that produced only three field goals.

It was a particularly numbing performance, no doubt aided by a surprisingly efficient Arizona State defense, yet one that left UCLA Coach Terry Donahue talking about offensive practicality.

“You can’t expect to beat Arizona State and not score a touchdown,” Donahue said.

The Bruins tried to do it, anyway. They even appeared to have a decent shot at pulling it off at halftime when they disappeared into the locker room with a 6-3 lead, made possible by kicker David Franey’s 2-1 edge in field goals over Arizona State’s Kent Bostrom.

The third quarter and a field goal by each side later, the Bruins still led, 9-6, but by then, Arizona State was working on its game-winning drive, the only scoring march by either team that concluded with a touchdown and not a field goal.

Arizona State covered 73 yards in just 6 plays, the final 11 on a touchdown pass from Jeff Van Raaphorst to Bruce Hill, who managed to cross the goal line before getting bumped out of bounds with 14 minutes 24 seconds left in the game.

That score gave the Sun Devils their first lead, 13-9, and it happened because they caught the Bruins by surprise. The UCLA defense was expecting a run on second and 10, but Van Raaphorst rolled to his left, and the Bruins failed to contain his progress before he found Hill alone.

Actually, Van Raaphorst had located Hill running all by himself a little earlier in the drive.

On third and eight from the Arizona State 29, Van Raaphorst threw over the middle to Hill, who caught the pass and wound up with a 48-yard gain.

On the play, the Bruins misplayed their man-to-man coverage. That play hurt, but UCLA certainly had a very good chance to stop the drive almost before it began.

Van Raaphorst threw a pass directly to UCLA linebacker Ken Norton on the first play of the drive. Norton bobbled the ball briefly and tried to run, but the ball dropped out of his heavily taped hands.

“I had that play read all the way,” Norton said. “I just couldn’t hold on to it.”

This was not a sensation new to the Bruins. Look back to the first quarter. Had Willie Anderson been able to hold a perfectly thrown 34-yard pass in the end zone before tumbling out of bounds, UCLA would have taken an early lead, and maybe all the bad things that happened to quarterback Matt Stevens in the second half would never have occurred.

After Stevens completed 8 of 10 passes for 81 yards in the first half, Air Matt was suddenly deflated. Stevens threw 10 consecutive incomplete passes in the second half before hitting two in a row during a futile drive with 1:30 (and no timeouts) left.

“I just didn’t execute real well,” Stevens said. “We were in a situation where we had to throw the ball, and they were beginning to tee off on us.”

Air Matt’s second-half numbers: 12 pass attempts, 2 completions, 12 yards.

“Sometimes Matt threw the ball well and sometimes he didn’t,” Donahue said.

Meanwhile, Van Raaphorst was shedding his goat horns. The previous week, Van Raaphorst had thrown five interceptions in a 21-21 tie against Washington State. But against the Bruins, he completed 16 of 19 passes for 187 yards, including 121 in the second half, as the Sun Devils improved their overall record to 3-0-1 and their Pac-10 mark to 1-0-1.

After their 13-9 lead on Van Raaphorst’s touchdown pass to Hill, the Sun Devils spent 7:59 on a drive the next time they had the ball. Twice the drive, which began on the Arizona State five-yard line, was kept alive by tailback Paul Day, the game’s leading rusher with 86 yards in 18 carries.

Day ran for a first down on third and six at the Arizona State nine-yard line, and he got another first down when he made 11 yards on third and eight from the 18.

The Sun Devils eventually moved all the way to the UCLA 13, where Bruin linebacker Billy Ray poked the football away from fullback Darin Tupper. Safety James Washington recovered the fumble at the 11.

Clearly, the Bruin defense had come up with a big play. So how about some offense? Not this time. Three plays gained six yards for UCLA, and the Bruins punted with 3:39 left.

But they got the ball back when Chance Johnson stopped Van Raaphorst on third and three at the Bruin 33, and the Sun Devils punted to the nine-yard line.

How about some offense now? Not this time, either.

Stevens threw four incomplete passes in 42 seconds. The Bruins turned the ball back to Arizona State, and the UCLA defense put itself back in front of those boulder-sized Sun Devil linemen.

Washington said the defense can do only so much, but he wouldn’t criticize the offense.

“The defense just needs to come up with some big plays earlier,” he said. “We can’t start pointing fingers at anybody yet.”

From the nine-yard line, the Sun Devils didn’t move much, but they got a 28-yard field goal by Bostrom with 1:36 left that finished off the Bruins.

As the game had worn on, Arizona State’s bigger players on the offensive line had seemed to wear out the smaller Bruins, which was mentioned briefly by Sun Devil Coach John Cooper and just as quickly dismissed by Donahue.

“I really don’t think that made much difference,” Donahue said.

So what did?

Cooper’s defense not only contained UCLA’s passing game by pressuring Stevens and knocking the running backs out of patterns, it also caused a near-total shutdown of the Bruin running game.

UCLA’s runners got only 85 yards. James Primus, who had 160 yards the previous week, led the team with only 49 yards in 18 carries, while Mel Farr had 28 yards in 11 carries and Gaston Green had 10 yards in 6 carries.

“They took away the draw, they took away the sweep and we can’t play like that,” Donahue said.

Next Saturday against Arizona, the Bruins have a chance to not play like that again. But if they lose again, the Rose Bowl and New Year’s Day are going to seem a lot farther away than they have in a long time.