Trojans Didn’t Have Enough Horsepower : USC: Without a pass rush and lacking UCLA’s emotion, Robinson’s players can’t quite figure out how they lost.

USC’s mascot, Traveler IV, stood as a silent sentinel, just outside USC’s locker room. His rider, Tom Nolan, the guy under the Trojan helmet that Stanford Coach Bill Walsh likes to call “a red industrial scrub brush,” sat still, sword raised.

As USC’s disappointed football players filed past, just inside a Rose Bowl tunnel, the white horse was as still as a statue, his head drooping slightly.

The horse was almost lifeless, as was his favorite football team in the second half Saturday against UCLA.

Traveler didn’t show any sign of life beside the quiet, all-heads-down procession until someone angrily whacked the wooden entryway to the Trojan locker room with a helmet.

Moments earlier, when the reality that USC was about to lose a fourth consecutive game to UCLA was coming into focus, UCLA partisans sent up a chant designed to probe the Trojan wound: “Four more years! Four more years!”

USC Coach John Robinson said the predictable, congratulating first Oregon for its victory over Oregon State, which clinched a Rose Bowl berth for the Ducks, then UCLA for gaining momentum in the 64th USC-UCLA game with a third-quarter running game and winning, 31-19.

“They ran on us better than we expected they would, and that was the difference,” he said. And he seemed to seethe slightly when asked about the lack of a strong pass rush on UCLA quarterback Wayne Cook, who completed 15 of 23 passes for two touchdowns.

“I would have liked it (the pass rush) to have been better, but I’m most disappointed at how they ran the ball on us,” he said.

USC quarterback Rob Johnson completed his first eight passes, giving him an NCAA-record 23 in a row, but then saw his pass offense fall apart in the second half in the face of a ferocious UCLA pass rush.

For the second consecutive season, a Johnson end-zone interception in effect brought the curtain down on a USC-UCLA game, although not nearly in the dramatic fashion of the 1993 game, when USC was in position to win the game.

This time, after a 21-point third quarter by the Bruins, the Trojans were out of it much sooner.

“We threw the ball well in the first half, but they wouldn’t let us do what we wanted to in the second half,” Johnson said.

“We just kept shooting ourselves in the foot. It didn’t seem like we had the ball much, and when we did we didn’t play well.”

Asked about UCLA’s six sacks, Johnson shrugged.

“They’ve traditionally put a lot of pressure on me, so we expected it,” he said. “We just couldn’t stop them.

“It’s fair to say they dominated us in the second half.

“I’m not thinking much about anything now. It’ll settle in tonight and tomorrow. It’ll hurt real bad.”

The Trojans said UCLA served up nothing they hadn’t prepared for.

“They didn’t do anything tricky, not a thing we didn’t expect,” linebacker Erroll Small said. “They beat us with straight-up football--powers, isos (isolations), dives--and we couldn’t stop them.

“And poor tackling didn’t help us, either. They were blowing our defensive line off the ball. I’m a firm believer that it all starts up front, and our defensive line just didn’t get the job done.”

Defensive tackle Matt Keneley didn’t quite see it that way.

“I don’t know if you can blame just the defensive line; the whole defense gave up big plays,” he said. “The same plays we worked on in practice, we couldn’t stop today.”

Speaking of big plays, Don Lindsey, Trojan defensive coordinator, could only shrug about one of them, a 30-yard touchdown pass from Cook to Jim McElroy with 2:48 left in the third quarter that gave UCLA a 24-12 lead.

“John Herpin (USC cornerback) went down the field with that guy stride for stride,” Lindsey said. “It’s not like we didn’t cover him. It was a game where we made great defensive plays in the first half, but not in the second half.

“That play hurt us, because they were already running effectively on us and then when they started hurting us with the pass too, we had some real problems.

“They brought their tight ends into their run game in the second half and they really went after our weak side.

“We missed a lot of tackles too. We couldn’t make plays. We’re not a high-risk defense--maybe we should have been today.”

For senior linebacker Jeff Kopp, whose USC career is encompassed by UCLA’s four-game winning streak over the Trojans, the pain was settling in.

“It hurts . . . we get pretty pumped up emotionally for this game,” he said. “It’s a low, empty feeling. But we have Notre Dame next week, and I’m going to start thinking about that tonight.”

USC center Jeremy Hogue wondered if UCLA had more emotional fuel.

“We didn’t play up to their emotional level,” he said.

“We felt if we jumped on them early in the game (with touchdowns), they’d quit. But all we could get out of those drives were field goals. In the third quarter, when they started with that long drive and scored, and then we went three and out, it put them at a higher emotional level than where we were.”

For senior offensive tackle Tony Boselli, a dream was over.

“I came to USC to play in the Rose Bowl, and this is it,” he said, softly. “It’s disappointing.”