In this shotgun formation, family doesn’t get a pass

PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- USC is playing really important football games, UCLA is still playing, and I have a sister.

She has a son who is very good at getting women pregnant -- two so far, and now he wants to marry one. She’s really excited because he’s even thinking about getting a job, cutting his ponytail to go to interviews, and would I please attend the wedding?

Karl Dorrell has already lost two quarterbacks, two running backs and now his only ally as I make the mad dash across country to get to Rhode Island before the bride starts showing.

A family dinner is set for Saturday, which means everyone might have to talk to each other. The last time that happened was nine years ago -- an aunt in the family who is also a nun, telling a story about a priest she knew. Haven’t heard from her since.

MY SISTER also has a daughter. She married a Wengernuk a few years back even though she wasn’t pregnant and forced to do so.

Her husband has a head of hair that looks like the tail of a Shetland pony after backing into a briar patch and then sitting down in his stall in an effort to shake off the burrs. “I grow a beard and I can be on the ‘Caveman’ show,” Wengernuk says, and how proud would the family be?

My other sister arrives with a husband, a Bears’ fan. She got married late in life so the pickings were pretty slim.

She spots a store down the block, just past the gang hanging out at a tavern across the way, and says she must walk to the store. Her husband makes no move to protect her because he’s on his third beer and telling everyone what he thinks of Rex Grossman.

So I join her, listening to complaints about the price of soda at the hotel while keeping an eye on gang activity, arriving at the store to learn that’s why we’re here -- so she can buy two Diet Cokes and take them back to the hotel at a savings of 25 cents each.

Later she will tell me she no longer wants to sleep with her husband. It’s one thing to talk in your sleep, I figure, quite another to learn someone is so fixated on Rex Grossman.

“He snores,” she says, and who knew that was Grossman’s problem?

I also have a brother. When the best man calls it a “special day,” my brother tells everyone he had a special day in 1982 when he married his first wife, another in 1988 when he married his second. He’s funny like that, although the first wife apparently didn’t think so.

The wedding is Sunday, and no one schedules a wedding for a NFL Sunday unless you’re in a real hurry, I guess, to walk down the aisle. By the way, she looked beautiful in her white wedding gown -- you could hardly tell.

I join my two sisters and brother for a dance -- mom and dad somewhere smiling, dad smiling because undoubtedly he would have taken the Chargers and the points.

The nun shows up, says a prayer hoping it’ll be nine years before we meet again, and we congratulate the great-grandmothers on still being alive. Did you ever notice that every great-grandmother is only 4 feet 1?

We leave before they put their left arm in, their left arm out and the great-grandmothers shake it all about, and before the happy newlyweds depart -- because what’s their rush?

There’s a chance, I suppose, someone in the family might take exception to something written here -- maybe the Wengernuk getting steamed after someone reads it to him.

But I can’t think of a family crack ever made here as nasty as what one UCLA brother made to another this weekend.

Chris Meadows, called “Craig” Meadows in the Long Beach Press-Telegram and apparently people do mistakes, is a walk-on defensive back, who made the recent switch to wide receiver.

Saturday he’s wide open, and drops a pass that might’ve made UCLA a winner. It happens. Someone misses a tackle in the first quarter, or blows a block in the second.

Meadows’ mistake comes in front of thousands, an Arizona State defender taunting him too. Later amongst his own family in the locker room, wide receiver Brandon Breazell, the guy who threw him the ball, talks to the media.

Two papers quote Breazell saying of his UCLA brother, “I needed my man to make a play for me, and I put it right in his hands, and you see the results.”

Brothers, all right, Cain and Abel.

Several newspapers also quote him saying, “We’ve been practicing that play all week and [Meadows] said, ‘I got your back, I got your back’ . . . and then when game time comes, well. . . . “

I can’t recall ever hearing harsher remarks directed at another teammate on the college level. The Lakers are pros, remember? I didn’t see Meadows quoted anywhere -- my mistake if I missed it. On Monday, through a UCLA spokesman, he declines to be interviewed.

But Breazell calls. He says his mother is upset. (No word about Meadows’ mother). He wants to clear things up. He says he and Meadows are fine.

No apology, though. He says he stood in front of the team Monday and made it clear none of it was meant the way it came out.

I read him his quotes from the paper. “Did you say these words?”

“Some of those words were mixed around,” he says. He also says he never said those things. And then says, “I said it, but I didn’t say it to dog him out.”

Take your pick.

He’s reminded several papers have him trashing Meadows much the same way -- making it unlikely it was made up. He was also spotted talking into a TV camera.

I got his back, though, writing down what he offers as his defense.

“What I said was, ‘It was a perfect pass from a perfect quarterback.’ I was joking,” Breazell says. “I didn’t mean any harm.”

Amen, Sister, just in case she’s upset too. And no matter what the editors might do in mixing the words around, the relatives still got to know I like most of them.

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T.J. Simers can be reached at t.j.simers@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Simers, go to latimes.com/simers.