UCLA Beatdown

I know I am usually not the blogger here and that most of the readers would rather hear from my wife, but I could not let this historic and one of my best weekend's here in Provo go without a blog entry. For hose of you who do not know, Katie and I love to go to the BYU football games. Last weeks match up was with UCLA.



To preface this game, this was the third game with the Bruins in 370 days since we played them last year in CA and in the Las Vegas Bowl. We lost in CA after coming out slow and with some sloppy play. The Cougs dominated the Bruins statistically, but turnovers (and some might say controversial home-cooking penalties) ultimately lost them the game. In Las Vagas, the Cougars again shot themselves in the foot and were out schemed by UCLA's defense, but were able to scrap by with a win by blocking a field goal as time expired.



Fast forward to last Saturday, BYU has just come off of a win over Washington where they had never won before winning by blocking an extra point. The win was tarnished, however, by the media blowing up over a correctly called but controversial unsportsmanlike penalty. It was a game that BYU should have won by more, but again turnovers hurt the cougs and Jake Locker was able to run when in counted (not to mention the HORRIBLE commentary who tried to keep reminding us that BYU was lucky to be able to play with the caliber of players in the Pac-10). Anyway, the media made it sound like the refs had lost the game for WA and BYU was given no credit for the win.



Now, we enter game time. I was a little nervous, remembering the Las Vegas Bowl and how our offense struggled and knowing the UCLA had knocked off #18 Tennessee 2 weeks previous. I was optimistic though and predicted BYU 37-UCLA 21. I told Katie that I predicted that this game would be the game where BYU would gel and have a complete game (Offense, defense and special teams would all do well). Man, was that an understatement. BYU came out well and at the the end of the first quarter it was 7 to 0 with BYU poised to score again. Then magic happened, 35 (yup thirty-five) points were scored in the second quarter (28 in the matter of like 5 minutes). BYU was on fire. The offense could not be stopped, the defense was flying around knocking people's heads off and causing turn overs. It felt like the game could have been over after the first half. With 8 minutes left in the 3rd quarter, BYU pulled its starters out of the game and to my utter delight BYU pitched the shut out and was the back ups were able to score against UCLA. For those who do not know, the final score was 59-0. To put that into perspective, BYU has not pitched a shut in years and this was the first time against a BCS opponent since 1977. To add injury to insult, that beat down was second worst in NCAA history second only to when USC beat UCLA something like 80-0 almost 80 years ago.



Just to make everything a better day, BYU showed that they could play with anybody. And Austin Collie had an amazing day. Here is a picture of the Collie scoring a TD and also the corner that had to defend him. I was happy to see him have a good day, although I always root for Mike Reed to have bigger games, I just really like him as a player and I would have liked to have seen Chambers get the ball on Offense, but I guess that I can't be too picky. I was also pleased to see a Nickel package and Brandon Bradley (who is in our ward) get playing time. I only hope that annoying guy from FSN was able to see how the "unathletic" cougs walked all over the "superior" UCLA Bruins. Keep it up Cougars!!! OK, thanks for letting me document this historic event.