It was the smart move for him

Karl Dorrell won’t have the same opportunity another UCLA football coach had after being fired for not winning.

When Bert LaBrucherie was fired by UCLA after the Bruins went 3-7 in 1948 (after going 20-9 his first three seasons), he was able to find another head coaching job without having to leave Southern California.

LaBrucherie was hired by Caltech to coach football and track.

But Caltech is not an option for Dorrell. The Pasadena school dropped football in 1993.

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Trivia time

Red Sanders followed LaBrucherie as the next UCLA football coach and had the job from 1949 to ’57. He died of a heart attack at 53 in 1958. Sanders guided the Bruins to a share of the national championship in 1954. That year they beat USC, 34-0, but the Trojans, rather than the Bruins, went to the Rose Bowl. Why?

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Quantum success

A recently released documentary, “Quantum Hoops,” profiles the basketball futility at Caltech in recent years.

But under LaBrucherie, Caltech, known for its academic standards, was respectable in track, winning 107 meets and losing 105 in 24 years. LaBrucherie coached Phil Conley, 1956 NCAA javelin champion and a member of the 1956 U.S. Olympic track team.

In football, LaBrucherie’s teams won 19 games in 19 years before he gave up that job to coach only track. But his 1957 team won four of seven games, which is outstanding by Caltech standards.

It was Caltech’s last winning season in collegiate football.

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Lost in Nashville

The Opryland Hotel in Nashville, where baseball’s winter meetings took place, has 600,000 square feet of meeting space, which makes finding one’s way around no easy task.

When Theo Epstein, Boston’s general manager, and Billy Beane, Oakland’s GM, were on XM Satellite Radio earlier this week, Epstein said, “I’ll give him [Beane] any player on our roster for directions to Bayou C.”

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Sounds legitimate

Jason Kidd didn’t play in the New Jersey Nets’ 100-93 loss to the New York Knicks on Wednesday night, saying he had a migraine headache. The next day he had to deny reports that he had faked the migraine as a personal one-day strike to induce a trade or contract extension.

Charles Barkley, for one, could understand why Kidd would have a migraine. “I’ve seen [the Nets] play and they give me migraines,” he said on TNT on Thursday night.

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Lost in space

“Not that the NFL Network is difficult to find or anything,” wrote Dwight Perry of the Seattle Times, “but it’s just been declared the official network of the federal Witness Protection Program.”

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Early indication

Terry Brennan, father of Hawaii quarterback and Heisman Trophy finalist Colt Brennan, could tell at an early age his son was fascinated by football.

“I’d come home and Colt would be watching ‘Monday Night Football’ sucking his thumb,” the elder Brennan told the Associated Press.

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Trivia answer

Even though the Bruins were the Pacific Coast Conference champions in 1954, they couldn’t go the Rose Bowl because of a no-repeat rule. USC ended up losing to Ohio State, 20-7, in Woody Hayes’ first trip to the Rose Bowl.

Ohio State was named national champion by the Associated Press that year and UCLA got the nod from United Press International.

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And finally

Legend has it that when Sanders, who was 6-3 against USC in his tenure at UCLA, was asked if the USC-UCLA rivalry was a matter of life and death, he said: “It’s not a matter of life and death, it’s more important than that.”

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larry.stewart@latimes.com