Tough, Last-Second Loss to Bo Leaves Bruins in a Blue Mood

These are dark, dark days at UCLA, losing in football this way to the University of Michigan--a basketball school.

Imagine, two football triumphs at the Rose Bowl for Bo Schembechler in one year. Basketball Coach Steve Fisher probably will recommend to the school administration that this alumnus of Miami of Ohio be permitted to continue running the football program, rather than bringing in a Michigan man to coach Michigan.

Meantime, you can knock UCLA out, you can step on its face, you can slander its name all over the place, but not much can hurt the Bruins worse than Saturday night’s last-second 24-23 loss to Elvis Grbac and his bodyguards did.

Led by their new quarterback, Elvis, and their old coach, Colonel Bo, the Wolverines paid a call on Pasadena and left the Bruins down at the end of Linda Vista Street, in Heartbreak Hotel, scoring nine points in the final 95 seconds to leave UCLA bluer than Hawaii.

Oh, woe is Westwood. Bad enough for the Bruins to blow a game to a Big Ten opponent at the Rose Bowl without USC already having slaughtered Ohio State a few miles away on the very same day.

Worse yet, to lose such a close game to a Schembechler-coached squad, well, c’mon, don’t be cruel. Know what Bo’s record is now in games decided by three points or less? It’s 13-19-4.

And wait. This gets worse.

For one thing, the loss leaves UCLA with only one success in three games--a three-point victory over nationally never-ranked San Diego State.

For another thing, the Bruins this week must watch films and practice with the full knowledge that they did everything possible to lose Saturday’s football game, after seemingly having it won.

For more than 3 1/2 quarters, they had played totally heads-up football. Bret Johnson was artistic at quarterback, whipping a couple of touchdown passes with throws that Troy Aikman could not have done any better. Shawn Wills was running hard, Marvcus Patton was forcing fumbles and Meech Shaw was tackling every Michigan man who moved, with the exception of Schembechler.

Then, they went back to playing heads-down football, the same kind they played two weeks ago against Tennessee.

They made three terrible mistakes over a 5 1/2-minute span.

First, there was a wrecked extra point. All Alfredo Velasco, one of college football’s finest, had to do was chip-shot a little old conversion kick with 5:42 remaining and UCLA would have led by nine points, 24-15, instead of by eight. But he never got the kick away cleanly, an event the Bruins would live to regret.

Next, Wills went over the left side for a three-yard gain, needing only to safely tuck in the football, the Bruins being stuck in their own territory and all. Instead, the tailback fumbled the ball away at the UCLA 41, the absolute worst thing that could happen.

Finally, there came a moment that will go down in UCLA football as one of the plays to forget. When the golden-era videocassette gets released someday, don’t be looking for this play.

Michigan, still behind by two points with 1:35 to go, tried an on-side kickoff after scoring. This wasn’t exactly strategy on genius Schembechler’s part. A flag-football coach could have made this call.

No kicker alive, no matter how hard he practices, could ever deliberately kick the sort of on-side kick that the Michigan kicker kicked. This ball not only squibbed, it squirted. A bad-hop grounder, it leap-frogged everybody on the UCLA forward wall and hopped directly into the hands of Michigan’s Vada Murray, who was moving on a dead run down the sideline.

A minute and a half later, the Wolverines had won themselves a football game.

They ought to be winless today, instead of 1-1 and ranked No. 5 in the national polls. If this is the fifth-best football team in the country, by the way, Elvis is alive and working in Memphis at a Burger King.

For UCLA, a fine season remains a possibility, if only because conference play has yet to begin. But the Bruins don’t feel much like winners, not after this latest experience. They are lonesome tonight.