Quite a Turnaround for McNown

It’s a numbers game, and this week the number is 175.2.

That’s Cade McNown’s pass efficiency rating, deciphered by the NCAA from a formula that includes elements of quantum physics, the moon being in the seventh house, the alignment of Jupiter with Mars, and the theory of relativity.

“I have no idea how it’s figured,” said McNown, UCLA’s quarterback and the fourth-best in the country, according to this week’s NCAA numbers. “It’s somebody up there doing stats, I guess. I don’t know.”

He does know that higher is better.

“At least, that’s what I’ve heard,” he said Monday.

There’s an easier way to figure efficiency. McNown has completed 44 of 61 passes for 765 yards and nine touchdowns, with no interceptions, in the last three games and UCLA has won all three. The Bruins have scored 172 points in doing so.

Now, that’s efficient.

And it’s even easier to figure out when all this efficiency began and why.

Chalk it up to the fans at the Rose Bowl.

It was a month ago, and UCLA was playing Tennessee in the first quarter. McNown had taken a sack in the end zone for the Volunteers’ first points, and had thrown the ball behind Jim McElroy, who tipped it into the hands of Tennessee’s Gerald Griffin for an interception.

The natives were restless.

Then, with Leonard Little hanging on him, McNown threw a ball directly into the hands of Cory Gaines, who returned it 57 yards for a 9-0 Tennessee lead.

With 3:05 left in the first quarter, he heard it.

“The team was already on the field because it was a TV timeout, and I started running on the field, and it was ‘Boooooooo!’ ” he said. “Just everybody booing me. I was, ‘Aw, thanks guys.’ People were pretty quick to jump on my back. . . . It’s pretty hard to miss when you’re the only one coming on the field and the crowd changes that drastically. You know.”

It was a crowd that remembered a sophomore season of 12 touchdown passes and 16 interceptions en route to a 5-6 record, and fair or not, it was one that remembered all of the times that their hopes had been dashed by a 19-year-old kid.

It was a typical McNown problem.

“He makes some mistakes because he’s so competitive,” said Al Borges, UCLA’s offensive coordinator. “He’s like a hitter with two strikes, and he’s not going to take a called third strike. He’s going to be swinging.”

And, in this case, missing.

“You go out and want to make something happen,” said McNown. “Even though it’s not there for you, you want to do it. That made me learn right there, you’ll get your chances. The two interceptions together taught me not to force anything, to try to make things happen.”

He has thrown 97 passes since without an interception. McNown finished the Tennessee game with 400 yards passing, and only Tommy Maddox has done better at UCLA with his 409 against USC in 1990.

“He just keeps getting better and better,” said UCLA receiver Rodney Lee, McNown’s target on four passes for 87 yards in a 66-10 victory over Houston on Saturday. “He’s calm. In the past, he seemed to have a sense of urgency in the huddle. Now it’s calm.”

It’s easier to be calm when everything is going your way. Quarterbacks will tell you that, when everything is working, time doesn’t stand still but it does go into slow motion and the three-to-four seconds available from the snap to the pass seem three-to-four minutes to spend in studying a field that seems a panorama of opportunities.

“I think the whole season, I’ve seen things pretty clearly,” McNown said. “And I think as the season’s progressed, guys are doing a better job of getting open than they were before. . . . Everybody’s getting a better feel of how things are supposed to be going.

“All that together allows you to see things better.

“I think I got touched once this week, and that was a late hit, so obviously the line is doing an awesome job. That’s what’s enabling me to see the field and see the receivers, read the coverage a little bit better and stretch the coverage a little bit, because I’ve got the time.”

And he’s taking advantage of it.

It’s all part of the maturation of a quarterback that reached another level on Saturday in the thumping of Houston.

In the second quarter, with first down at the Houston 15, the play call from the sideline was Skip Hicks on a sweep.

Nothing unusual there, because the play call on first down lately always seems to send Hicks somewhere.

But McNown saw trouble.

“I saw about 11 guys about five yards past the line of scrimmage,” he said. “They were all in tight.”

Hicks was about to run into a wall, so McNown called what UCLA coaches term “an advantage audible” and threw the ball to freshman Brian Poli-Dixon, who ran between two defenders for a touchdown.

The Bruin system allows some freedom to a quarterback, who essentially has a choice of three plays at the line of scrimmage, and also can call “opposite,” meaning the opposite of the play called in the huddle.

But the advantage audible is designed to get UCLA out of a play called by a coach that obviously won’t work.

“It was the first advantage audible we’ve called all year,” Coach Bob Toledo said.

It was a sign of increasing confidence.

“I don’t see a lot of things changing right now,” McNown said. “I just see a lot of things coming together, a culmination of everybody’s effort, everybody’s confidence.

” . . . I don’t know. It’s a funny game. Actually, doing badly is a little easier to answer because you can point to things and say you shouldn’t have done this and you shouldn’t have done that. When things are going well, it’s usually because everyone’s doing his job.”

Including the quarterback, who is doing his efficiently. According to the NCAA, 175.2 efficiently, whatever that means.