Sunday Morning Quarterback: UCLA Bruins Beat Heat and Bowling Green

While the Bruins worked through the high temperatures, the same can't be said for UCLA's fanbase.

Dorian Thompson-Robinson scrambles to escape a Bowling Green defender. (Photo Credit: Ross Turteltaub/uclabruins.com)

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If you saw yesterday’s UCLA football game against Bowling Green, it was unremarkable. The Bruins started of looking bad, especially on special teams. The Bruins’ special teams were responsible for 10 of the Falcons 17 points yesterday. They had a punt blocked and returned for a touchdown and a dropped punt by Jake Bobo led to a Bowling Green field goal.

Thankfully, this was a non-conference game against an opponent who wasn’t as talented or as well conditioned as the Bruins. By the end of the game, it seemed like the Falcons were having a guy cramp up on almost every play while UCLA only had a few guys cramp up. According to Bruin linebacker Carl Jones, Jr. in the postgame press conference, the Falcons had eight guys cramp up. Teammate Mo Osling III seemed impressed that Jones had been counting. You can chalk that up to Chip Kelly’s focus on training, nutrition and hydration.

Kelly discussed the team’s hydration effort during his postgame press conference. Talking about the hydration plan, he said:

Our medical team and our football performance team did a really good job of getting our guys prepared for this from a hydration standpoint and understanding it but it was hot, but there was no getting around that.

We have a hydration program that our our guys go through in terms of what they put in their bodies and electrolyte-wise…what type of fluids they're putting in their bodies.

We check for hydration on a daily basis and then we obviously hydrate-tested them before we're here. We can prescribe, if they are slightly dehydrated, how many milliliters of water and electrolytes they need to to get back to where they need to go.

We had the cool zone fans on on the field. We did some work with some towels and ice towels that can kind of get to your vagal nerve and, if you kick your vagal nerve, it can take your body temperature down a little bit quicker. So, we had a hydration plan going into this game and I think our guys executed it.

Here is the entire postgame press conference which includes interviews with Kelly, Jones, and Osling as well as Dorian Thompson-Robinson and Kazmeir Allen:

Meanwhile, the Bruin offense got things going and scored 38 consecutive points to beat the Falcons and even cover a very large spread.

Defensively, UCLA held Bowling Green to just 162 yards offensively and just 125 through the air. That’s a solid building block even if the Falcons were a clearly inferior opponent.

That pretty much sums up the game on the field.

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Unfortunately, the other important story of this game was in the stands.

Attendance yesterday was just 27,143. That’s a new all-time low attendance for UCLA football at the Rose Bowl. The previous low mark was 32,513 for the 1992 game against Oregon State.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I get it. It was absolutely brutal yesterday.

Fans were clamoring for whatever shade they could find, and there wasn’t much. I know my colleague Dimiti Dorlis was lucky enough to find a seat in the upper reaches of the Rose Bowl where there was some shade provided by the press box.

I was personally determined to try to tough it out in my usual seat. After all, I had made it through the 2000 Michigan game which was about as hot. This time, I only lasted until about midway through the second quarter when the heat proved to be too much.

I certainly wasn’t alone.

Of the 27,143 fans who showed up despite the heat, many left the game early because the heat was too much. The paramedics of the Pasadena Fire Department had a certainly had busy day taking care of fans for whom the heat was too much.

I’m not going to blame anyone for leaving yesterday’s game early. I know that it would not have been good for me to stay much longer than I did yesterday, and I’m someone who 99 times out of 100 stays until the band is on the field after a game. Yesterday was that one time.

Thankfully, I had the forethought to set my Tivo to record the game. I was glad I did. I watched what I had missed as soon as I got home.

In fact, I’m not even going to fault any fan who decided not to go because of the heat.

That said, the good news is that the forecast for next week’s game looks like it’s going to be a much more manageable 88° for the Alabama State game. To be sure, next week’s game will be disappointing for many, myself included, since it will remove UCLA from the list of schools which have never played an FCS opponent. At the same time, I am really looking forward to seeing the Alabama State Mighty Marching Hornets at halftime. The Mighty Marching Hornets are one of the top HBCU bands. It will definitely be a, if not the, highlight of our next game.

While it would be super cool if the UCLA Bruin Marching Band joined them and they both played together, that’s probably unlikely since UCLA is not in session for a few more weeks.

So, I’m hoping that we see a lot more fans in the stands next weekend. Come on out and support your Bruins!


Go Bruins!!!

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