Flag Football Not Part of Game Plan

The struggles against Stanford on Saturday came largely from within as a Bruin team that averaged 8.8 penalties for 75 yards the first six games, the second-best mark in the conference, was flagged 12 times for 125 yards.

One, a holding call against James Ghezzi, resulted in a second-quarter touchdown pass from Cade McNown to Danny Farmer being negated. UCLA ended up with nothing after Chris Sailer missed a 53-yard field-goal attempt. Most of the others simply resulted in lost hair for coaches and frustration for all the Bruins.

“They played through a lot of adversity--lots of penalties and turnovers,” Coach Bob Toledo said of his players. “We were sloppy and just didn’t play very well.”

The bigger problem was that seven penalties, for 76 yards, came in the second half of a close game. A 16-yard roughing-the-passer charge pushed along a Stanford drive in the third quarter that resulted in a field goal and 17-14 lead. A personal foul when the Bruins had the ball a few minutes later moved them all the way from the Cardinal 37 back to the UCLA 48, two plays before they were forced to punt.

And so on.

“We were making big plays, and all of the sudden we’re going backward,” tailback Keith Brown said. “We can’t do that.”

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Jermaine Lewis will probably have X-rays today to learn the extent of the injury that knocked him out of the game in the first quarter Saturday. The preliminary diagnosis was a bruised right calf. . . . The 419 passing yards by Stanford’s Todd Husak was the second-best performance ever against UCLA, behind only the 435 by Pat Barnes of California on Oct. 26, 1996. The 192 receiving yards by Troy Walters, Husak’s main target with 10 catches, was the fifth-best such showing versus the Bruins.