ANALYSIS : It All Adds Up to UCLA’s Losing Season

It was Saturday evening, and Wayne Cook was musing over what he had done and seen earlier in the day.

“That’s the way our offense was supposed to look,” he said after passing for 296 yards and two touchdowns in a 31-30 victory over Stanford.

But the offense hasn’t looked right, and neither has the defense, which held the Cardinal to six second-half points. That’s why the Bruins needed the victory to break a six-game losing streak, one short of the school record and one longer than anything Terry Donahue has gone through in 19 seasons as the school’s coach.

So much for prophecy.

In August, media and coaches gathered in a Westside hotel and predicted Arizona would be the Pacific 10 Conference representative in the Rose Bowl. That USC would push the Wildcats, but not very hard. That UCLA would be close.

And Arizona would stumble, because it always stumbles. It’s why the Wildcats have never played in Pasadena on New Year’s Day.

USC? The evaluation was based on a returning senior quarterback, Rob Johnson, one of the conference’s best, and a recruiting class heavy with junior college players.

But what if the quarterback were injured? And what if the new players weren’t ready for four-year football?

There was UCLA, the Pac-10 Rose Bowl entry last season, with a returning quarterback, a Heisman Trophy-candidate receiver, a fair start on a rebuilt offensive line and a history of opportunistic defense. A second Rose Bowl in a row? Could be.

Hasn’t been.

The numbers didn’t add up.

85

That’s the number of scholarships available to Division I football teams, and it has dwindled by NCAA edict, leaving less room for the recruiting mistakes that have been made at UCLA.

In between this week’s practices, the Bruin coaches will scatter around the country to correct those mistakes.

The Bruins need a blocking fullback, a dominating tight end and defensive backs with the size to cover big wide receivers and the willingness to take on a running game head-on. But what UCLA needs most are offensive linemen. It got none in its last recruiting class, and this season’s unit is a mixture of juniors and redshirt freshmen.

It’s the sort of thing best remedied by a visit to the junior college store, but that’s not the way UCLA does things. Among Pac-10 schools, only at Stanford is it tougher to enroll a junior college transfer. For that matter, only at Stanford is it tougher to enroll any player.

“The standards of the school are high,” said Gary Bernardi, the Bruin recruiting coordinator and tight ends coach. “And that’s OK. We know that starting out.”

“It’s not a level playing field,” said Donahue of the Pac-10, “but that’s not a reason. We can get in the players to win.”

If they’re the right players.

7

That’s how many defensive starters were expected to return but who haven’t been available most of the season.

Safety Marvin Goodwin, linebacker Jamir Miller and nose guard Bruce Walker left a year early for the NFL; injuries ended the careers of linebackers Andrew McClave and Brian Tighe before the season, and safety Tommy Bennett’s legal problems have left him suspended from school.

In perhaps the biggest loss, cornerback Carl Greenwood broke his ankle on a play in which he was not hit during the Southern Methodist game, UCLA’s last victory before Saturday and Stanford.

The following week, the Bruins were hammered, 49-21, by Nebraska’s option offense that rushed for 484 yards. “If I’d been there, I don’t think that would have happened,” said Greenwood, who was proficient at dealing with the sweep and taking on ball carriers.

In their places, youth has been served, with eight freshmen or sophomores among UCLA’s 10 defensive backs. Changes have been made, with Rod Smalley moving from the outside to inside linebacker. And stopgap measures have been tried.

But the defense has given up an average of 416.2 yards and 28.1 points a game after giving up 335.9 yards and 19.2 points last season. It is tied for last in the conference in sacks with 2.4 a game and, after an opportunistic year that included 40 turnovers and ended in the Rose Bowl, has gotten the ball only 12 times via fumble recovery or interception.

And UCLA is last in the conference in holding the opposition on third-down plays.

18

That’s the jersey number of J.J. Stokes, who was injured on UCLA’s fourth offensive play of the season and played only two halves in the first seven games.

He was his old self Saturday, with five catches for 94 yards, his first touchdown after a season in which he had 17 and a two-point conversion that won the game with 3:05 to play.

When Donahue went home from the UCLA opener, a 25-23 victory over Tennessee, he told his wife, Andrea, that he thought this would be a good season. A week later, when it was discovered that Stokes’ injury would keep him out of his first game since seventh grade, Donahue figured the Bruins could handle the setback.

They haven’t. As the injury lingered, and the losses mounted, it became apparent that, without Stokes as a target, Cook was limited. Wide receiver Kevin Jordan stepped up--he has 63 catches for 1,015 yards to lead the Pac-10--but didn’t draw the defense’s attention as Stokes did. With the two in the lineup, the team wins. With only one, the team loses six in a row.

4

That’s the number of new offensive coaches this season, and, at times, each has had to wonder what he has gotten into.

Offensive coordinator Bob Toledo came from Texas A&M; with visions of returning to the forward pass with Cook, Jordan and Stokes. When last season’s top running back, Skip Hicks, injured his knee while long jumping in the rain with the UCLA track team in the spring, Toledo visited Florida State to take a look at the four-wideout offense that brought the Seminoles a national championship last season.

He came back with plans for an aerial circus. Then Stokes was injured, and nobody joined Jordan as an offensive threat. Four wideouts work when you have four wideouts. When you have one, three extra receivers are merely spread around the field.

Mike Sherman came with Toledo from Texas A&M; to coach an offensive line that had sent two players from last season’s unit to the NFL. What was left included juniors Mike Flanagan at center and Jonathan Ogden at left tackle, both of whom were Rose Bowl starters; guard James Christensen, last season’s starting center until he was injured, and Matt Soenksen, the team’s strongest player; and right tackle Paul Kennedy, who finally made the starting lineup in his fifth season at UCLA.

Kennedy went down first, blowing out a knee in the SMU game. Christensen has missed three games because of knee problems and is playing with a partially torn ligament; Soenksen missed three games because of an arch problem. Sherman has worked into the night with redshirt freshmen Chad Overhauser, Chad Sauter and Sean Gully to try to develop them more quickly, but the most lasting lesson came in the Washington State game, a 21-0 loss in which Cook was sacked seven times.

Nine offensive linemen have started games.

Bernardi has turned tight ends into tackles, to try to give Cook extra protection, and Norm Andersen, in his second tour as a UCLA assistant after working with the Bruins in the good old days, has tried to eliminate dropped passes, a problem all season.

1

The Bruins bear a scar from the Jan. 1 game in Pasadena, during which they looked around at their home field and thought they were in Camp Randall Stadium in Wisconsin.

A sea of red--some estimates have put the Wisconsin crowd at 78,000 among the 101,237--spoke of profit-taking by UCLA fans and shocked players who had anticipated a home crowd.

“When I hear about the Rose Bowl, it doesn’t do as much for me,” said one player, who asked to remain anonymous, after the loss to Arizona put the Bruin streak at six. “They sold us out.”

1,000

The Bruins try to run a balanced offense and have a tailback, Sharmon Shah, with 912 yards. That he’s doing it without a blocking fullback makes the accomplishment even greater.

UCLA has turned tailbacks Daron Washington and James Milliner into fullbacks, and they want to carry the ball. True, they would rather play fullback than not play at all, but both were recruited on the basis of resumes built around high school achievements with the ball in their hands, not their helmets in some linebacker’s chest.

1989

That was a similar season, said Donahue, to whom little is new after 19 years as coach. After that season, five changes were made in the coaching staff, with three assistants fired and two moving on to other jobs voluntarily.

The 1994 season probably won’t have similar results. Donahue said he anticipates no changes among the staff, pointing out the unforeseen problems brought about by the injuries and NFL defections and saying that the current staff deserves a chance to right the ship.

Victories in the final two games, against Arizona State on Nov. 12 and USC on Nov. 19, would help because, though the six-game losing streak will linger, finishing with three victories in a row will remove some of the sting and send the Bruins into next year with a little more spring in their strides.

“I already know that we’ll be better next season,” said Donahue, pointing to the junior offensive line; to Shah and Hicks, who will be juniors next season; to Jordan, who will be a senior; and to the defensive backs, who are having to grow up on the field.

But this season will end on Nov. 19, because the numbers didn’t add up. And because they subtracted from what could have been.