LOS ANGELES (AP) — There’s joy in the UCLA football program for the first time this season. An improbable upset of then-No. 7 Penn State gave the Bruins their first win and enthusiasm for the rest of the season.
“The best thing about it is just seeing our players and coaches smile again,” interim coach Tim Skipper said Monday. “We haven’t had a lot to smile about.”
Losing their first four games, the firing of head coach DeShaun Foster, the departures
of two coordinators and weak attendance at the Rose Bowl made for an ugly situation.
The Bruins were 25 1/2-point underdogs against the Nittany Lions on Saturday, but they led all the way in earning a 42-37 win and becoming the first 0-4 team to beat a top-10 opponent in 40 years. Quarterback Nico Iamaleava had five touchdowns in his best game since transferring from Tennessee.
“Nico brought those guys together,” said Jerry Neuheisel, the tight ends coach who called the offensive plays. “His understanding, his willingness to do the extra work, to learn the game plan and then go coach the guys when he was not in practice the other day, he is special.”
Now, the Bruins (1-4, 1-1 Big Ten) are tasked with backing up their play at Michigan State (3-2, 0-2) on Saturday.
“We don’t want to be one-hit wonders,” Skipper said. “Our mentality, our mindset is to have a good week of practice, stay in the now. What’s important now is how we’re going to win.”
Neuheisel will be calling offensive plays again this weekend. Only this time, he'll have more than three days to prepare. He found out last Tuesday that he'd be tasked with the job against Penn State. He slept about three hours between then and game day. After the win, the players carried Neuheisel off the field.
“Everybody talks about the play-calling part of it,” Skipper said, “but the number one thing you have to do, you have to get the players to believe in you. He did that really, really quickly.”
What didn't work so smoothly was Neuheisel's communication with Iamaleava via his headset.
“There's like multiple times during the game I'm calling the play but the headset is flipped up because I'm used to being a position coach," Neuheisel said. "Then all of a sudden I'm pushing the wrong part of the button trying to talk to him. It was a mess.”
Iamaleava, for his part, heard silence at times, leading him to call his own plays. The first one worked, with the quarterback getting a big scramble. The last one didn't, when the Bruins got stuffed on fourth-and-1.
“He just has to remember to push that button," Iamaleava said, smiling.
Neuheisel, a former Bruins quarterback and the son of former UCLA coach Rick Neuheisel, said “delusional optimism” set in last Friday when he saw the players' enthusiastic buy-in to what he was telling them.
“Hopefully, we got more of these days coming,” he said.
The rest of the season includes games at No. 7 Indiana and No. 1 Ohio State.
While the Bruins try to turn things around, UCLA has formed a search committee to find its next head coach.
“I haven't thought about that one ounce,” Skipper said. “I'm not a dwell-on-the-past or dream-about-the-future kind of guy."
At the same time, the 47-year-old has spent nearly 25 years paying his dues as an assistant at eight different schools, including alma mater Fresno State, where he spent last season as interim head coach.
“I always wanted to be a head coach, I really did. That's just me, I like to be at the highest of the highest no matter what I'm doing,” Skipper said. "Head coaching jobs are like the highest peak that you could be in the coaching profession, so I enjoy that and that's my goal to always be that. But right now sitting here today I am all about getting ready to go play Michigan State.”
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