And Away Griffith Goes--Wide Left

UCLA kicker Chris Griffith said last week that Saturday’s game against Oregon meant more to him than the one later this season against USC. There was no reason not to believe him. No UCLA player would say such a thing unless he meant it.

It was understandable too. When the Bruins played the Ducks last season, Coach Bob Toledo turned the game to Griffith’s right foot, setting him up for a 50-yard field goal that would have given the victory to UCLA. Griffith missed. Oregon won, 21-20.

Toledo was criticized for conservative play calling that didn’t give his offense much of a chance to move the ball closer for Griffith and the Bruins, who only a couple of weeks earlier had been dreaming of a berth in the national championship game, remained in a funk with their third consecutive loss en route to a fourth -- 27-0 the next Saturday to USC.

But the anguish of last season, in particular the loss to Oregon, lingered with none of the Bruins as much as it did for Griffith. He said that hardly a day went by that he didn’t think of the missed kick that had let his teammates down and betrayed Toledo’s confidence in him. He was thinking about it even while standing on the sideline Saturday at the Rose Bowl.

“When the difference was only three at halftime, I just had a feeling it was going to come down to the last play,” he would say later.

He wanted it to come down to the last play, to him.

It did.

Although Toledo wasn’t exactly playing for a field goal as he did last season, neither did he call any risky plays on UCLA’s last drive that might have moved them out of range for one.

So there they were, again, facing fourth down and 14 at the Oregon 29 with less than two minutes remaining when Griffith got his chance. He trotted onto the field for a field-goal attempt, this one from 46 yards, that would give the Bruins a lead and enable him to put last year behind him.

“I felt really good,” he would say later. “I hit it really good. Wide left. That’s the way it goes.”

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Wide left. They’re cursing those words today in Tallahassee and Westwood.

I didn’t see much of the game between Florida State and Miami, which ended with the Seminoles missing a game-winning field-goal attempt as time expired, but I can vouch for the fact that 68,882 fans at the Rose Bowl for Oregon’s 31-30 victory saw an extremely entertaining game.

That seemed destined from UCLA’s first play, when Cory Paus threw a 55-yard touchdown pass to Tab Perry. Oregon drove 80 yards in six plays to tie. Toledo tricked the Ducks with a 53-yard touchdown pass from a wide receiver lined up in the backfield, Jon Dubravac, to Craig Bragg. Oregon drove 80 yards in six plays to tie.

Oregon’s Keenan Howry returned a punt 79 yards for a touchdown. Paus found Bragg for a 71-yard touchdown pass after the Duck cornerback fell. Bragg scored his third touchdown after pulling down a Paus pass with one hand and running 46 yards. A 96-yard kickoff return by Oregon’s Allan Amundson was called back because of holding. The Ducks did score again, on a 74-yard pass play from Jason Fife to Howry.

You could imagine the coaches, Toledo and Oregon’s Mike Bellotti, drawing plays in the dirt behind the benches.

And then the game came down to the kicker.

The kickers, actually.

Hardly lost in all the excitement was sophomore Jared Siegel’s 59-yard field goal, tying the record for a Pacific 10 Conference game, as time ran out in the first half. Those three points proved very important.

Hardly lost in the postgame analysis for UCLA was not just Griffith’s miss in the fourth quarter but also his low extra-point attempt that was blocked in the third. That one point proved very important.

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So it appears as if neither UCLA nor USC will play in the Rose Bowl game on Jan. 1.

The Trojans were for all practical purposes eliminated last weekend, when their kicker missed an extra-point try in the fourth quarter that would have made it more difficult for Washington State to come back and win in overtime.

Griffith said he hadn’t heard about that. He shrugged. He said he had enough problems of his own without worrying about those of the cross-town kicker.

Toledo tried to deflect the blame from him, a little.

“It’s hard to believe that the game came down to one play again,” he said, adding that it wasn’t merely that one play that cost the Bruins the game.

He also said that his decision to fake a 45-yard field-goal attempt on fourth and 15 late in the third quarter--an odd call resulting in an eight-yard pass from holder Garrett Lepisto to Marcedes Lewis--shouldn’t be interpreted as a loss of confidence in Griffith.

But Griffith, seven for 12 in field-goal attempts this season, didn’t seem too sure of anything except that he had again failed against Oregon.

A senior who came to UCLA as a walk-on five years ago and earned a scholarship, he stood in front of his locker and answered the same questions from one wave of reporters after another.

“Obviously, I could see it was coming down to me and I wanted to get on the field,” he said. “I had been thinking during the game about the situation last year, but I wasn’t thinking about it when I went out there. I was focused on what I had to do.

“I don’t know what happened. I just missed.”

That’s the way it goes. Wide left.

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Randy Harvey can be reached at randy.harvey@latimes.com