Bruins Try To Muscle In On Tinseltown Spotlight

The USC Trojans get most of the attention from football followers in their home city of Los Angeles, and deservedly so. Saturday’s rout of Washington State pushed USC’s winning streak to 30 games, a span that includes last year’s Bowl Championship Series crown and the AP national title in 2003. The Trojans are quarterbacked by the college game’s biggest star in defending Heisman Trophy winner Matt Leinart, who turned down NFL millions to lead the good life in college for another year.And a good life it is. Without an NFL franchise in Los Angeles, the Trojans are the biggest thing going in a city that craves luminaries the way a drowning man craves a life jacket. Leinart has become an A-list celebrity and gossip column regular. When tailback LenDale White scored a touchdown against Washington State, he tossed the ball to a fan wearing his no. 21 standing behind the end zone – a routine occurrence except that the fan was Snoop Dogg.But while coach Pete Carroll’s band barnstorms the college football world as perhaps the most celebrated unit in team sports, there is another college football program right in USC’s backyard making plenty of noise this year as it improbably heads towards a season-ending battle of unbeatens against the Trojans.A few miles up the road from USC sits Westwood, home to the UCLA campus and the undefeated Bruins, another team that is a perfect fit for Tinseltown. What the Bruins lack in celebrity wattage, they make up for in spades in Hollywood endings. UCLA improved to 8-0 Saturday with their most improbable comeback yet – a 30-27 overtime victory at Stanford in which the Bruins scored 21 unanswered points in the final 7:04 just to force the extra session.It was the Bruins’ fourth win this month in which they had trailed by at least 10 points in the fourth quarter. That sentence almost has to be read twice to truly appreciate the magnitude of the accomplishment. Some programs go years without a single comeback of that extent, yet the Bruins are authoring one nearly every week. As a result, UCLA finds itself tied atop the Pac-10 with their more famous citymates.With winnable games remaining at Arizona and at home against Arizona State (combined record: 5-10), UCLA could easily be 10-0 heading into its showdown at USC on December 3 – a contest the Bruins will have three weeks to prepare for. If both teams are undefeated, UCLA may finally steal some of the media attention USC has been enjoying all season. UCLA has hovered under the radar all year after being unranked in the preseason polls, a result of a 6-6 record last season. But a closer look at the two programs reveals more similarities than differences.Both schools feature explosive offenses led by standout quarterbacks and running backs, and question marks on defense. And there’s a shared history of come-from-behind wins, too. USC faced significant deficits at both Oregon and Arizona State before rallying to win, though not in quite as dramatic a fashion as UCLA’s October exploits. And then there was the last-second win at Notre Dame on October 15, a game you might have heard a thing or two about.If Leinart fails to repeat as the Heisman winner this season, it may well be because the award goes to his backfield mate, Reggie Bush. But if not for that pair, UCLA’s tandem of Drews, quarter Drew Olson and tailback Maurice Jones-Drew, might well be getting fitted for tuxedos for a December trip to New York.The similarities are eerie. Leinart is third in the nation in passing efficiency, having thrown for 2,512 yards with 19 touchdowns and six interceptions. Olson is fifth, with 2,167 yards, 23 touchdowns, and just three interceptions. Bush leads the nation with 197 all-purpose yards per game and has scored 13 touchdowns. Jones-Drew is fifth at 184 yards per contest and has reached the end zone 18 times. The net result is that USC is first in scoring offense; UCLA is fifth.Jones-Drew has a Hollywood-worthy story of his own. At the beginning of the season, he was known simply as Maurice Drew before adding the “Jones” to honor his late grandfather, who suffered a heart attack while attending his grandson’s game on September 10 and died shortly thereafter. Jones-Drew asked the UCLA trainers to add his grandfather’s name to his jersey as a tribute to the man who was largely responsible for raising him.While USC is statistically better on defense than the Bruins, allowing 339 yards per game versus 415 for the Bruins, the Trojans have been more vulnerable to the pass. Taken together, all of the stats suggest that when the Trojans and Bruins take the field together in five weeks, the scoreboard operator will earn his day’s wage.It’s fitting that this year’s game will be contested at the L.A. Coliseum. In the heyday of this rivalry, both teams played their home games at the grand old stadium, and both would wear their home uniforms when they faced each other. UCLA moved its home games to Pasadena’s Rose Bowl in 1982 after the Raiders moved to Los Angeles and took up residence at the Coliseum.While USC has the richer football history and tradition, it didn’t always enjoy its current status as the toast of L.A. USC had a losing record as recently as 2000, before Carroll arrived to rescue the legendary program. UCLA was a serious national-title contender in 1998 before losing its last two games to finish 10-2 for the second straight year. But the Bruins have lost 34 games since then, making this season’s rise under third year head coach Karl Dorrell all the more surprising.All this is occurring amid swirling rumors that the NFL is considering shoehorning the hurricane-displaced New Orleans Saints into the Los Angeles market for next season. One might reasonably consider the wisdom of that move during the current L.A. football revival; with two celebrated programs sporting undefeated records and rankings at or near the top of the polls, the nation’s second-largest media market seems to be getting along just fine without the NFL, thank you.Perhaps the USC and UCLA players should arrive for their game on December 3 via the red carpet. After all, in this Hollywood story, USC is the big-budget blockbuster, while UCLA is the independent film hoping to sweep in and steal the Oscar, or at least the Pac-10 title. If it does, perhaps Snoop Dogg and the celebrity set will make their way to Westwood next fall.Mr. Levine is a writer for the statistical Web site FootballOutsiders.com.

Bruins Try To Muscle In On Tinseltown Spotlight

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