PASADENA — Ho hum? Saturday night’s game against Stanford, the once-mighty foe that’s fallen so far in this wild new world of college football that UCLA came in as 16-1/2-point favorites — a yawner?
Kickoff was late, after dark at 7:30 p.m. — but no way.
Alert and motivated, UCLA won a big game Saturday night. One of its biggest of the season.
Because it was a game the Bruins were supposed to win. Not a game they’d necessarily get up to win, but a game they needed to.
They needed that W if they planned to keep pace with the their fellow Pac-12 frontrunners USC, Oregon and Utah to keep their conference championship and college football playoff dreams alive.
Still, human nature and an overmatched opponent can create a dissatisfying stew of letdown, especially when they were coming off an emotionally draining game at Oregon.
But the now-No. 10-ranked Bruins (7-1, 4-1 in the Pac-12) had no appetite for further disappointment.
They scuttled Stanford 38-13, handling business like a good team should, like a team that’s taking nothing for granted.
“I only have four or five more weeks here as a Bruin before we start in a bowl game,” said UCLA’s fifth-year senior quarterback Dorian Thompson-Robinson, who was sacked twice and tossed around Saturday, ducking in and out of the medical tent between completing 18 of 29 passes for 199 yards.
Thompson-Robinson played through some pain and stayed in the game longer than most UCLA fans would have liked, probably because, well, “I’m trying to take advantage of every opportunity I can,” he said.
That included Saturday’s against Stanford, which had won two consecutive games despite some tellingly pedestrian numbers; the Cardinal (3-5, 1-5) came into the Rose Bowl with the nation’s 94th-ranked scoring offense and 83rd-ranked scoring defense.
And though the Bruins stalled some midway through Saturday’s contest, they didn’t futz around early, as they had to start the season against Bowling Green, or a couple of games later, against South Alabama, the FBS opponent that squandered an upset opportunity with an ill-advised fake field goal attempt in the fourth quarter.
All that ancient history was irrelevant Saturday, when UCLA put its proverbial foot down, building a buffer as large as 32 points before the Cardinal finally found the end zone with about four minutes to play (pay dirt for the first time since its opening drive against Notre Dame on Oct. 15, some 10 quarters of football earlier).
The Bruins weren’t perfect, but they were plenty good enough, thanks to Zach Charbonnet’s monstrous performance (three TDs and 198 yards on the ground for his fifth consecutive 100-yard rushing game) and a proud defensive recovery (the Bruins permitted just 270 total yards and just two trips to the red zone).
So if anyone remained unconvinced by these Bruins’ prowess, or perhaps forgot how dynamic they were in victories over then-No. 15 Washington and No. 11 Utah, Saturday’s showing reinforced the fact that Chip Kelly is steering a serious football team.
With a case of healthy selective amnesia.
Though crucial, still this wasn’t a win that inspired the crowd of 43,850 fans to storm the field or attack the goal posts. Most of the those on hand had already cleared out midway through the fourth quarter, making for a tangle of red brake lights in the time-honored L.A. tradition of trying to beat the traffic.
Might be a good thing for those drivers that Kelly had to stick around and talk with media and couldn’t be among the people piloting a vehicle outside of the Rose Bowl, because the man apparently has no use for rear-view mirrors.
One trip back to Oregon was enough for the former Ducks coach, who preferred not to revisit the previous weekend’s 45-30 loss in Eugene, UCLA’s first defeat this season.
On Saturday, his Bruins didn’t only get it right against a former nemesis (Stanford recently had an 11-game winning streak against UCLA and arrived in L.A. having won in each of its previous six games at the Rose Bowl), they flushed their most recent bitter memory too.
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“We don’t talk about that,” Kelly said. “That’s not our world. Our world is every week is an entirely new season — it doesn’t matter if you win or you lose. We just came back on Monday, and I thought that our guys were great on Monday …
“I think that when you live your life in the past — I feel really bad for people that do that. We don’t live our life in the past. We don’t have a rear-view mirror in our office. We don’t have a rearview mirror on our practice field. We are always looking for the next opponent and who we’ve got next.
“And it’s the same thing with these guys. They can enjoy this win as much as they want tomorrow, but when we come back in on Monday morning, we’ve got to set our sights on Arizona State.”
That game against the 3-5 Sun Devils? Another big game, another gimme — if there were such a thing.
“This is what we wanted, this is what we expected,” said Thompson-Robinson, the team’s dependable spokesman and veteran signal caller. “And now that it’s here, it’s time for the real work to start. We haven’t been in this position, at least as long as I’ve been here, so we’ve got to find some deep digging to do and really clean some stuff up so that we can get this thing done.”