Perfect Bruin Changed Signals

They expect it all this instant, today, immediately, hurry up, got to have it, now, now, now, and why not?

This is when we give it to them. This is what we teach.

If a 17-year-old can play basketball, he is encouraged to stop his education so he can start in the NBA.

If a 20-year-old can play football, he is encouraged to become a college dropout and join the NFL.

Some female figure skaters win championships before they can complete a coherent sentence.

Some female tennis players combine an adult serve with the maturity of a 10-year-old.

Our society is so worried about restraining its children from their sports dreams, we push them there before they’re ready, and they expect to arrive before they have a right.

So it came to pass recently that UCLA’s quarterback of the future became UCLA’s quarterback of the past before even taking a snap in the present.

His name is J.P. Losman, and he’s no flake. He was considered one of the top three high school quarterbacks in the nation, an academic whiz, a genuine good guy who didn’t drink or miss church and only recently had the nerve to get an earring.

He was so excited about joining the school of his and his longtime Angeleno family’s dreams, he graduated from Venice High in the middle of his senior year. He immediately enrolled at UCLA. He attended spring practice. He made the honor roll during the spring quarter.

He was the perfect Bruin. Each night at home near Venice, he lay his head on a UCLA pillowcase and snuggled underneath a UCLA comforter. Hanging from the wall is a UCLA blanket. In the corner is a UCLA neon sign.

For two years, buried in his sock drawer was a piece of scratch paper that read, “My dream is to play for UCLA.”

In a nearby scrapbook, there is even a button containing a photo of him wearing a Bruin uniform.

A photo taken when he was 10.

“The table was set for this kid to be a huge star here, a great story, the local boy leading UCLA in the Rose Bowl,” said Gary Bernardi, a UCLA coach and recruiting coordinator.

Handsome, smart, gregarious and local, J.P. Losman was the answer to UCLA’s football and marketing dreams, the perfect eventual replacement for the perfection that was Cade McNown.

Until Sunday, when he flew out of town to enroll at Tulane.

The perfect fit said he didn’t fit.

The Bruins say he wanted more playing time.

Either way, how could he have been around long enough to know?

Losman left school before his first fall practice, his first fall snap, his first fall class with the other incoming freshmen.

The town hero, finished before he even started.

The Bruins, who kept their promise to not recruit any quarterbacks once they signed Losman, are stunned.

Members of his family, many of whom argued with J.P. until the final days, are stunned.

Losman looks at them like, what did you expect?

“Everybody has that dream,” he says. “You go to college, you light it up for three years, then you go make a coupla million. You have a right to go for that dream.”

An unrealistic dream. A microwaved dream. A kid’s dream.

And you know who put it there.

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J.P. Losman didn’t merely excel in a hurry-up offense, he existed in one.

Remember the days when kids’ futures depended on their senior season in high school? When colleges would judge their abilities, then invite them to their campus for winter visits?

Remember the days when kids wouldn’t decide on college until February of their senior years?

Losman never bothered with any of that.

He was offered a scholarship by UCLA after the morning practice at a one-day camp during the summer after his junior season.

By the end of the day, he had committed.

He never took any other visits. He never spoke seriously to any other coaches. Even before the start of his final year at Venice, he was a Bruin.

“My whole family was UCLA fans, I was a UCLA fan, it was where I always wanted to go,” he said. “I agreed right away. There was no reason to go anywhere else.”

And there was no reason for UCLA to look anywhere else. Losman is 6 feet 3, quick, with a great arm and on-field presence. Recruiting services ranked him anywhere from the top high school quarterback in the country to the third-best.

“For everybody, J.P. going to UCLA was a dream come true,” said his mother, Tricia.

He passed for 3,544 yards with 49 touchdowns and only nine interceptions in his senior season at Venice High. He was the big man on campus.

Except these days, the big man doesn’t always stick around campus.

By February of his senior season, he had enough credits to leave Venice High, so he did. In April he enrolled at UCLA, one day before the start of spring practice.

He said, “I wanted to get a jump on things, I wanted to start learning.” His mother added, “I thought it was fine. I was proud of him, wanting to start college early, get ahead.”

Looking back, if there was any mistake in all of this, that was it.

When he took the field as one of five quarterbacks hoping to succeed McNown, he was obviously the only first-quarter freshman on the team.

He had no peers, no support group, few friends, nobody to talk to when practices got long and it became obvious that he would have to earn a place on the depth chart.

“I just didn’t feel comfortable,” Losman said. “I realized, maybe this wasn’t for me.”

Although Losman said he wouldn’t go into detail out of respect for UCLA, a local recruiting expert has a few ideas.

Being the most inexperienced kid there, Losman was probably put in his place, just as all rookies in all walks of life are treated.

“But you have to be very mature to walk into that sort of situation all alone,” said Rick Kimbrel, managing editor of PrepStar magazine. “You know there were a bunch of guys out there who wanted to kick the stuff out of him, let him know that this was not L.A. Unified, that this was the Pac-10.”

Not only did he not feel comfortable with the entire team, he didn’t even feel comfortable with the other four quarterbacks.

“I’m sure everybody was thinking, ‘Here comes this gunslinger, let’s see what he’s got,’ ” Kimbrel said. “It was just natural. And when he needed somebody to talk to, who were his friends? Who did he hang with?”

Losman is not known as a complainer or whiner. In fact, he said nothing to his mother until after the spring game, when Losman asked her whether she noticed that he received fewer plays than the other quarterbacks.

“I just told him he had to be patient,” Tricia said. “He was just starting out, this was a great thing he was doing, he just had to hang in there.”

Turns out, this was harder than Losman thought it would be.

“I’m used to playing in an offense with four wide receivers, an offense that features me,” he said. “I knew it was different at UCLA, and I thought I could deal with it. . . . But sometimes, guys don’t just don’t fit in.”

After stewing about it for more than a month, with family members telling him to calm down but his heart telling him to ignore them, he and his father finally met with UCLA Coach Bob Toledo in early July.

In what must have been one of the more unusual discussions in Toledo’s career, when Losman said he wanted to transfer, Toledo and Losman’s father both tried to talk him out of it.

Toledo could promise many things, but a starting job wasn’t one of them. His offense is too complicated, the other four quarterbacks had all been there at least a year, it would take time.

“He felt he wanted more time, more reps, and we weren’t ready to do that,” Toledo said.

Countered Losman: “I didn’t care about that. Look, I have to redshirt at Tulane anyway. I just didn’t feel comfortable.”

A week later, Toledo called Losman’s house. The quarterback answered the phone, talked for a bit, then hung up and called to his mother.

“Hey, Mom, I just did it,” he said.

“Did what?” she said.

“I just told Coach Toledo that I didn’t change my mind.”

“I didn’t even hear the phone ring!”

Many around shared that sentiment of surprise. But soon, the phone was ringing again, with Kansas State and Michigan and Purdue and Miami and San Diego State calling, before Losman finally settled on Tulane.

“I’m now with a coach [Chris Scelfo] I can really relate to, in an offense that really suits me, and it’s a great school,” Losman said. “I couldn’t be happier.”

He’s a good kid, and he will do well at Tulane, and folks here will still follow him closely, but there remains one question.

How could this happen?

Could UCLA have monitored his situation more closely, sent somebody to sit on his doorstep when he was thinking of leaving? Well, sure, but at some point, the Bruins can’t waste time on a kid whose heart was clearly not in it.

Could Losman have realized that UCLA turned down a chance to sign highly regarded Kyle Boller to stick with him, and maybe tried harder to keep his end of the bargain? Well, sure, but he’s just a kid, and kids don’t think like that.

Kids think the way we tell them to think.

J.P. Losman is a star. He is going places fast.

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Bill Plaschke can be reached at his e-mail address: bill.plaschke@latimes. com.