Put Them On Wanted List

Eric Scott asked, “Did Washington State win?”

Mike Grieb answered, “Yeah.”

Jim McElroy looked at his two fellow UCLA receivers. He asked, “So where’s that leave us?”

Grieb said, “Cotton Bowl, right?”

“No way,” UCLA quarterback Cade McNown told them.

“No?” Scott asked.

“No way,” McNown repeated. “Fiesta Bowl.”

Grieb said, “I don’t think so. Arizona State will go to the Fiesta.”

“They won’t,” McNown insisted. “Forget that. The Fiesta’s going to want us. They want fans to fill those hotel rooms. We won’t go to the Cotton. We’re going to an alliance bowl, dude!”

Maybe so, maybe no.

Either way, UCLA wins.

This team belongs in a New Year’s bowl game and it will be in one--somewhere. OK, so the Rose Bowl is booked. Stuff happens. New Year’s Eve in sunny Phoenix would be fine. New Year’s Day in cooler Dallas wouldn’t be bad. Whichever bowl is lucky enough to get UCLA is getting a strong, entertaining, deserving, butt-kicking 9-2 football team.

UCLA beat USC--again--in a terrific contest Saturday at the Coliseum before 91,350. McNown passed for three touchdowns. Grieb caught a pair. McElroy got the other. Scott made a sweet punt runback. Skip Hicks cut and slashed for 117 yards and a touchdown. Javelin Guidry tackled everything that moved and made a clutch interception. Wasswa Serwanga picked off a pass that stopped USC once and for all. Brian Willmer sacked the SC quarterback twice. Shaun Williams nailed two SC ballcarriers before they got out of the backfield.

That’s the way the Bruins played all day--hard.

And so did the Trojans, from beginning to end.

You would never know this was a 6-5 team by how it played Saturday. The first 15 or 16 minutes were as good as college football gets. R. Jay Soward got single coverage and John Fox found him for 80 yards and a touchdown. Mike Bastianelli cut across the middle for 17 yards and a score. Chad Morton ran 49 yards with a handoff. The score was USC 21, UCLA 14, faster than you could say John Robinson.

Unfortunately for the Trojan coach, the offense didn’t score a touchdown in the last 44 minutes 11 seconds.

All they could get was a field goal, with 2:08 to play. Adam Abrams made it from 36 yards, under pressure. Thanks to him, USC could try an on-side kick. The Trojans still had a chance.

Robinson was willing to do whatever it took. All is fair in love, war and the USC-UCLA game.

The players lined up.

One of them on the receiving team was Grieb, a 6-foot-4, 248-pound junior tight end. He was UCLA’s biggest star of the game, scoring on pass plays of nine and 38 yards.

You won’t catch this, the USC coach told him.

“John Robinson looked right at me,” Grieb said. “He called out, ‘The ball’s going the other way. Don’t worry, it’s not coming to you.’ ”

Really?

“I swear,” Grieb said.

So what happened?

“So, naturally, the ball comes right at me,” Grieb said. “And it goes right through my legs.”

It worked to a T. Backup kicker Adam Rendon was given the job of squiggling the on-side kick. Rendon is a former soccer player. The junior approached the ball, stutter-stepped . . . and then kicked it off the wrong foot, using his left instead of his right.

The ball was Grieb’s to grab. But he didn’t. He Bill Bucknered it. It squirted through him and became anybody’s ball. A freshman defender, Ife Ohalete, outhustled everybody to claim it for the Trojans at their own 48.

If they could go 52 yards, they could go to a bowl game with a 7-4 record and a good feeling about this whole season. Have a happy December. Have a merry Hawaiian Christmas at the Aloha Bowl. And make UCLA’s holidays just a little less cheerful.

“We just didn’t have the firepower,” Robinson regretted.

No, they didn’t. Fox did some excellent things at quarterback, and could be quite good in the future. But on third-down conversions, USC was one of 12. That hurt. On the final drive, Fox was sacked for a 10-yard loss, threw incomplete twice and was intercepted by Serwanga at the UCLA 23 in the final minute.

That was that. UCLA had USC’s number again.

“They’re a great football team and they’ve got a lot of talent,” UCLA senior offensive tackle Chad Overhauser said, “but I can tell my children that we played USC five times while I’ve been here and we beat USC every time.”

A Bruin celebration began. Nobody celebrated better than Jason Stephens, a freshman defensive back. He did an Ozzie Smith back flip, then ran up into the Coliseum stands.

For the winners, the day had begun at a hotel, where UCLA’s coaches called the players together after breakfast to watch a movie. According to Scott, a senior receiver and kick returner, “They put together a little film of past SC games to show us. That got everybody fired up. Our attitude was, ‘We can’t be the ones to lose it.’ ”

They didn’t.

UCLA had won again. UCLA was going to have a happy New Year’s. UCLA was off to a bowl, dude.