Defense gets sick of criticism, makes hell freeze over
Ran into the devil walking through Westwood on Halloween night, so I asked him if he bought a parka and a pair of ice skates yet.
He gave me a strange look, and walked quickly in the other direction. I told him I just figured that after the UCLA defense shut out a Pac-10 opponent for the first time in almost two decades, hell might have frozen over.
So maybe the Bruins’ defensive effort against Stanford wasn’t evidence of an impending apocalypse, but it was certainly one of the biggest nobody-could-have-seen-this-coming moments of the college football season so far.
UCLA, after all, had given up 93 points and 1,086 yards in its previous two games.
Yet at least for one afternoon, the UCLA defense neither bent nor broke. The front four harassed Stanford quarterback Trent Edwards, the linebackers swarmed to the football, and the secondary blanketed the Cardinal receiving corps.
All that added up to the team’s first shutout since 1996 – a result that stunned everyone except apparently the Bruins themselves.
“I’m not at all surprised as much as everyone in this room is surprised,” UCLA coach Karl Dorrell told reporters after the game.
Well, maybe the coaching staff saw this coming, but I don’t see how.
To be honest, you could have convinced me to loofah scrub the entire defensive line before I would have believed that UCLA could hold Stanford, a team that scored four touchdowns against USC, without a point on Saturday.
Putting it in perspective, the Cardinal men’s water polo team outscored its football team, 4-0, against UCLA on Saturday. And one guy scored all four goals.
So I guess the obvious question now is what did the Bruins do differently this week that they haven’t all season?
“I can’t put a finger on it,” linebacker Spencer Havner said.
Well, here’s my opinion. After listening to UCLA’s post-game interviews, I think the key to the defensive performance was more than just flawless execution. Having endured several weeks of intense media criticism, maybe the Bruins finally got sick of it.
“The criticism definitely hurt, and it sunk in deep,” linebacker Justin London said. “But that’s the sign that this is a different team from last year. ... We did everything we could, not to let it happen again.”
That resolve was evident in every one of the Bruin defenders as the shutout became a more realistic possibility.
“We still had it in our hearts that we weren’t going to let them score,” safety Jarrad Page said.
And they didn’t.
Not even late in the fourth quarter when Stanford had the ball inside the UCLA 10-yard line. The Bruins stuffed the Cardinal four straight times, preserving the shutout and allowing the offense to run out the clock.
The question this week leading up to the Washington State game will be whether the UCLA defense is more than a one-hit wonder.
Can they post a second-straight shutout on Saturday? If it happens, hell really will freeze over.
Eisenberg’s column appears every Monday during football season. E-mail him at jeisenberg@media.ucla.edu.
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