What About Bob?

This is about a Los Angeles college football coach who couldn’t lose.

This is about long winning streaks and national championship aspirations and NFL job offers.

This is not about Pete Carroll.

This is about Bob Toledo.

This is not about the party, this is about the hangover.

“Pete is a terrific coach, and I’m wishing him the best,” Toledo says. “Because eventually, everybody loses a game, and I know what happens then.”

It is a Thursday morning, and the former UCLA boss can be found, as usual, on a golf course near his Westlake Village home.

He is still a football coach, Holy Toledo, still with all of his hair and his belly and his swagger.

“Hey, I’m ready to go,” he says.

He still keeps plays in a notebook, scribbling ideas as he watches countless college football games in his family room.

“I watch so much football, they ought to let me vote in that Harris poll,” he says.

It has been almost three years since he was fired by UCLA, where he’d won 20 consecutive games and two conference championships and had beaten USC three times. Toledo could easily be walking the sidelines again, but for one small thing.

He doesn’t have a team. He can’t even get some teams to acknowledge his existence.

He says he’s not bitter, and his frequent smiles and shrugs back him up, but what has happened to Toledo since his firing is something right out of his trademark trick playbook.

He has applied for jobs at three Pac-10 schools -- Arizona, Washington and Stanford -- and Nevada Las Vegas. Only Washington returned his call.

He once was considered the brightest offensive mind in the game. The reborn Cleveland Browns wanted him to lead their new franchise to glory. Two other NFL teams offered him jobs. The Oklahoma Sooners tried to steal him before hiring Bob Stoops ... and now he can’t get a jingle from, well, you know, UNLV?

Talk about a reverse.

“I have no idea,” Toledo, 59, says. “I thought it was common courtesy that when people call or write, you respond. I know I always responded when somebody contacted me.”

Then he grins again, a smile we saw daily for seven years, during which Toledo twice won as many games in a season as any other coach in UCLA history -- 10 -- while presiding over some of its most infamous scandals.

His optimism is still seemingly eternal. His stardom was not.

With Karl Dorrell having led this year’s Bruins to a 6-0 record and a national top-10 ranking, does anybody even remember last seeing Toledo? Does anybody even remember that he’s still in town?

“I guess I’ve gone a little bit underground,” Toledo says.

Some of it is Toledo’s choice, as UCLA is paying him $153,000 annually for four more seasons as part of his rollover contract. If he takes a job at a similar or greater salary, he loses that money. With most of his family in Southern California, he is also reluctant to stray far from the West Coast.

“When I was coaching UCLA and said I wanted to retire in Los Angeles, it wasn’t a ploy, I meant it,” says Toledo, who was fired in December 2002.

So he’s not bitter. A better word might be “baffled.”

How could he go from the hottest coach in the country to a guy who wasn’t even allowed to coach his final team’s bowl game?

He coached four first-round NFL draft picks, has had players in four of the last five Super Bowls, and yet he spends his days shouting, “Fore?”

“It was like I was cut off from UCLA like a tentacle,” Toledo says.

Where did it all go wrong?

Toledo sighs and utters a word that, around Westwood, needs no elaboration: “Miami.”

Truly, on a December day in 1998, this was the beginning of his end. The 20-game win streak and the shot at a berth in the national title game ended with a 49-45 loss to the unranked Hurricanes.

Yes, yes, running back Edgerrin James had his coming-out party in that game, and he’s been making defenders miss ever since.

But I was on the sidelines at the end of that game, and it appeared that some Bruins were missing tackles intentionally. Toledo does not comment on that observation but acknowledges that the game may have been lost the previous night.

Toledo says the team’s strategy meetings were canceled because of the furor over his decision not to allow players to wear black sweatbands in protest of the University of California’s affirmative-action stance.

“It was the worst Friday meeting we’ve ever had,” he says. “I had to just send them off to their rooms -- we couldn’t get into small groups -- there was so much talking back and forth about it. It was a huge distraction.”

After the game, offensive players blamed defenders for blowing assignments and not playing while hurt, and Toledo’s sense of family never recovered.

In ensuing years, the program was rocked by handicapped-parking scandals and drunk-driving scandals and dope scandals and all sorts of problems that wound up on Toledo’s desk and in the headlines.

“What happened at UCLA, it happens at USC, it happens everywhere, kids making poor choices,” Toledo says. “I suspended players, I disciplined them, I did the best I could.”

When Dan Guerrero replaced Pete Dalis as athletic director in the summer of 2002, he wanted better.

Says Toledo: “It was obvious, they felt they needed to make a change to get people to stop talking and writing about this off-the-field stuff. None of it would die until they got rid of me.”

Says Guerrero: “We had to change an environment that had grown to be unhealthy. If he had stayed, one more transgression the following season and the program would have imploded.”

So Toledo disappeared and, amazingly, still is invisible, a good man, deserving of another chance, caught in a tough spot.

In an era when Mike Price gets another shot, Bob Toledo doesn’t?

“Tell everyone I’m still happy,” says Toledo, sauntering to the first tee with that smile. “But tell them I’m still looking.”

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Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Plaschke, go to latimes.com/plaschke.