No winning formula for UCLA yet

Pasadena, CA (News4usOnline) – The UCLA Bruins still have not figured out how to win a football game. As a result of UCLA’s inability to win, head coach DeShaun Foster lost his job soon after the Bruins fell flat in a 35-10 loss at the Rose Bowl Stadium. 

The Bruins’ offense found the endzone just one time and failed to put any points on the scoreboard beyond the third quarter. UCLA is now winless through its first three games. 

“You can look at it two ways,” quarterback Nico Iamaleava said during a postgame press conference. “You can be 0-3 and you look at it and you fold, and you don’t care about the season. Or you can look at it as – we know that we’re not playing at our best out there for us, to lose these games.”

“It’s one thing if the other team is just better than you, but we’re just shooting ourselves in the foot with so many costly penalties that are costing us in big-time moments,” Iamaleava went on to say. “For me, I’m looking at the season ahead of us, we’ve got seven or eight more games to play. It’s time to go get better.”

Offensively, Iamaleava, the highly-touted transfer from Tennessee, was supposed to revive the Bruins. That hasn’t happened yet. Through the team’s first three games, UCLA has been outscored 108-43. 

In games against Utah and New Mexico, the Bruins could not muster more than 10 points in those individual contests. In falling to the Lobos, it was the second straight game in which UCLA lost to a Mountain West Conference opponent. UCLA also fell to defeat against UNLV before suffering a loss at home to New Mexico.    

Before his firing, Foster said the buck stops with him. 

“Everything that happens can fall on me,” Foster said. “I’m the head coach. It can fall on me. You don’t have to try to word things differently. I’m the head coach. But what I do know is that eventually this team is going to play with discipline.” 

“It’s going to happen. It’s eventually going to happen. Pretty sure we didn’t think we would go on a run last year either when it happened. One thing that is going to happen is that those guys who are in the room are going to continue to believe and eventually it’s going to turn around,” Foster added.  

Against New Mexico, UCLA was very much in the game until the final period. That’s when the roof collapsed. Trailing 14-10, UCLA surrendered 21 points in the fourth quarter to the Lobos. That was what sunk in the Bruins. 

“We’re just not starting fast enough,” UCLA defensive lineman Gary Smith III said shortly after the game. “It’s really the little things. Nobody wants to start 0-3. It’s been a lot of the little details that we got to clean up. We got the guys to do it, we just got to get it done.”

In this particular contest, the Bruins were essentially bullied by the Lobos. New Mexico outgained UCLA on the ground, rushing for nearly 300 yards (298) and totaled more first downs (22-15), and generated more offense (450 to 326) than the Bruins. 

Coming into the game, New Mexico head coach Jason Eck said he was confident his team could take the Bruins.    

“I definitely thought we could beat them, and I thought if we could get up on them, it would be hard on them because they’ve been down a lot, and sometimes when things aren’t going well, you can spiral downward and stuff,” Eck said. “I probably expected them to maybe have a little bit more early. I thought we’d give them our best shot early, so I was a little bit surprised how well we jumped on them early.”

The most telling aspect of this defeat for the Bruins was the number of penalties the team accumulated. New Mexico had just four penalties for 29 yards. On the other side of that equation, UCLA amassed 13 flags for 116 yards. 

Regarding the penalties, Iamaleava spoke to the team’s lack of discipline and what the Bruins need to do to shore up the problem. 

“I think Coach Foster preached [discipline] in the locker room. When we’re at our best, we have it. It’s on us, all of us as a group,” Iamaleava said. “The coaches are putting us in great positions to go out and perform. I think we just have to go back to going out there and having fun. This is a game, that as a little kid, you love to play. I think a lot of our teammates and our group is treating this like a job. We have to go back to having fun and playing the sport that we love.”