TIME TO BEAR DOWN

“You guys owe it to yourselves to play 60 minutes . . . with great effort, great intensity. It’s the last time we’re going to walk out that tunnel together, guys. The last time we’re going to walk out as the 1996 UCLA football team. I’m proud to be a part of it.”

--Bob Toledo, addressing the Bruins just before last fall’s USC game

*

Jolie Oliver is as much a part of UCLA’s defense as Weldon Forde, Shaun Williams or Brian Willmer.

She’s in charge of defending Bob Toledo’s psyche, of making sure that seldom is heard a discouraging word and that skies are not cloudy all day around the coach’s office.

“I think everybody out there loves us, because she gets rid of all the bad letters,” Toledo says. “She opens all my mail, and if it’s a bad letter, she throws it away and I don’t ever get to see it.”

There haven’t been many . . . yet.

“I don’t think expectations last year were high,” Oliver says. “When expectations aren’t high, people understand.”

They’re higher now, understand.

Toledo has been in the office a year. Terry Donahue’s old Rose Bowl posters are gone, replaced by a plaque on which is inscribed “UCLA 48, USC 41.” Replaced as well by hopes and aspirations of a still-somewhat-new coach in an old program that had become a little frayed around the edges.

A coach who admits he has been on a yearlong honeymoon, and that perhaps the honeymoon is coming to an end.

It’s Bob Toledo’s team, his offensive and defensive systems, some of his players.

His responsibility.

His fault.

“Well, I think that people know that we’ve had to come a ways because we needed some recruits,” Toledo says. “People know we’re playing probably the toughest nonleague schedule in the conference. I think people are sympathetic to that, but I also know that people want to win. And I think that just playing well and being exciting is not good enough.”

It had to be enough in a 5-6 first season in which the Bruins vexed their coach and embarrassed him, but also made him proud and happy.

And taught him. And learned from him.

“I think he’s more comfortable now, because we’ve been through it a year,” says Al Borges, Toledo’s sounding board as the Bruins’ offensive coordinator. He is perhaps closest to the coach because of their histories and personalities, and also because of their daily 45-minute walking battles against middle-aged waistlines.

“I think he knows our football team better,” Borges continued. “Instead of saying, ‘What can this guy do? Who are we going to run inside? Who can run outside? Can this kid pass-protect? Can we get any pass rush out of Weldon Forde?’ he knows now after 11 games and two spring footballs what all the guys can do. The only mysteries now are the freshmen. That makes a difference. I don’t care what anybody says, if you know your team, you know much better how to handle the personalities.”

The harshest and most frustrating assessment was made at season’s end, when the euphoria of beating USC had worn off, replaced by the knowledge that UCLA was two points from a bowl game.

Two points.

Stanford 21, UCLA 20.

It still gnaws at Toledo.

“We talked about it the whole off-season,” he says. “If we just win one more game, we would have gone to a bowl game. And I honestly believe that if we had Shaun Williams [a safety who was injured], we would have won that football game.”

Or if the Bruins had scored with 51 seconds to play, 78 yards of the field to cover and three timeouts to help along the way. Instead, UCLA’s “two-minute offense” panicked, got off only four plays and embarrassed its coach. He publicly took the blame. Coaches do that. But privately he passed it along in two meetings, three days apart, with his players.

“I was really upset with [the Stanford game],” he says quietly. “I guess I was upset because I took the blame for that because I was the head coach, but we practiced those situations and they didn’t do it. . . . It’s like they weren’t coached to handle that situation, and they were. That’s what disturbs me.”

Three weeks later, the Bruins used the two-minute drill for much of the second half in beating USC in overtime after having been behind at the half, 24-7.

By then, beating the Trojans was salve for an injured season, too late to save it but in time to make it more palatable. And it made looking back a little easier, and looking forward much brighter.

Retrospective has been harsh.

“[The hardest part of last season was] probably the inconsistency of not making routine-type plays,” Toledo says. “I think that was very frustrating for me. We’d win one week, we’d lose the next. We just couldn’t stay on an even keel and get better.”

And an assessment of the hand he had been dealt was critical. UCLA had no players taken in the NFL draft for the first time since 1942.

“I hate to blame anybody, but it’s out there for everybody to see,” he says. “The pro guys come and they watch games and they watch practice and they watch film. They know who can play and who can’t. So, yes, it was probably a pretty good indication of what we’re dealing with.

“We can’t catch the ball for them. I think routine plays should be made by routine players. You don’t have to be a great player to make a routine play, and that’s one of the things we’re trying to stress. We’re going to make great plays, and we need to make great plays. You have to make the routine plays.”

It would be nice to fast-forward to the present, but that isn’t the way college football works. From one season to the next there are stops.

There is recruiting.

Better players have been signed, but three of them--receiver Freddie Mitchell and defensive linemen Andy Kassotis and Jesse Simms--didn’t make the grades or test scores to qualify for a UCLA scholarship. That usually doesn’t happen in Westwood, where standards are higher than those of the NCAA, but where pre-admission scrutiny tends to weed out those who can’t make it.

Kassotis and Simms missed by one letter grade on one course, Mitchell by taking the Scholastic Assessment Test three times, with his highest grade on the first.

“It concerns me, sure,” Athletic Director Pete Dalis says. “It usually doesn’t happen here. But I don’t think you can take one year and say it’s statistically significant. Maybe we’ve been lucky in the past. We’ve had people in similar situations, who have been passed by the committee--which is made up of academicians--with a stipulation that they had to do one thing to qualify. And they have done that one thing.”

This year, three didn’t.

And besides recruiting, there is the necessity of keeping track of players on hand who offer continuity. Or who disturb it.

Toledo has suspended three--defensive end Vae Tata, offensive tackle David Plenty Hawk and defensive back Tod McBride--for failing to conform to team policies.

“I don’t have a lot of rules, but I do have a lot of do’s and don’ts,” Toledo says.

You don’t have wrecks and get charged with DUI, as Tata did. You do pay your bills in full and on time. Plenty Hawk and McBride didn’t.

“He doesn’t like it, “ Borges says. “I can tell. When we talk, we talk about that and I can tell he doesn’t like to discipline players. But he’s very willing to do it if that’s what he’s got to do. Bob likes the kids and he wants to give them every chance to be good citizens and good students and good football players--until they screw it up.

“But when he does, he doesn’t wait long to do it. Some guys will procrastinate and they mull over it, but Bob says, ‘This is what we’ll do.’ . . . When you’re pushing all the buttons and you’re being scrutinized as much as the football coach at UCLA is, a lot of guys would balk: ‘Oh, no, maybe I shouldn’t.’ But he’s shot right from the hip.”

And sometimes from the lip, in public assessments of players that those players sometimes see as public floggings. Southern California is a big market, and mistakes are made, there are 50,000 in the stands to see it, hundreds of thousands to watch it on television and millions to read about it.

A fumble, a missed tackle or a dropped pass is hardly a secret.

“As I’ve told our players on our team, this is a family and they know I’m going to do whatever I can for them,” Toledo says. “I’m going to give them the best I can give. But like a family, when you have children, you’ve got to scold them, you’ve got to discipline them. But you also got to love them, and I do. I put my arm around them and my door’s always open. I’ve got a great line of communication with them, so I think they respect that.”

Communication goes both ways. Players said they were a bit leg-weary last year in early-season games at Tennessee and Michigan, so morning practices this year are shorter. Maybe they won’t be as leg weary against Washington State, Tennessee and Texas.

It’s all part of a building process in its second year, with a coach who has been in the job a year now, and who is a year older.

“When I was 30, 31, I was indestructible,” Toledo says. “I could do it all. I was going to win. That’s what I was like when I went to Pacific [as coach in 1979]. Nobody had been able to do it there. I was going to get it done. That just tore me up when I couldn’t get it done. I realize now that I’m a little older, players get it done.

“I’m more realistic in my older age. We can give them direction, we can give them guidance, we can give them a set of plans to get it done, but then players have to get it done. Players make the plays, teams win the games.”

Or lose games. But the coach gets the letters.

Or doesn’t get them. In a new season, expectations are greater and victories will bring letters of congratulations. Losses will bring letters of criticism. And an opportunity for Jolie Oliver to play defense.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

FIRST IMPRESSION

A look at how Bob Toledo compares to other first-year UCLA football coaches:

*--*

Coach, Year W-L-T Pct Edwin Horrell, 1939 6-0-4 .800 Terry Donahue, 1976 9-2-1 .792 Tommy Prothro, 1965 8-2-1 .773 Red Sanders, 1949 6-3-0 .667 Dick Vermeil, 1974 6-3-2 .636 William Spaulding, 1925 5-3-1 .611 Bert LaBrucherie, 1945 5-4-0 .556 Bob Toledo, 1996 5-6-0 .455 Bill Barnes, 1958 2-4-1 .357 James Cline, 1923 2-5-0 .286 Fred Cozzens, 1919* 2-6-0 .250 Pepper Rodgers, 1971 2-7-1 .250 Harry Trotter, 1920 0-5-0 .000

*--*

* Coached only one season