On Friday the Ducks face an old nemesis, now wounded and maligned.
Rick Neuheisel was fired today as UCLA coach, fired from the school where he was a Rose Bowl winning quarterback. Friday will be his last game as the Bruin head coach. 87-58 in three stops, “Slick Rick” won four bowl games at Colorado and Washington, including two over the Ducks, but only made one minor one running the football program at his alma mater. He had a losing record in his effort to end the football monopoly in Los Angeles, not even matching the record of his old wide receiver, Karl Dorrell.
Neuheisel went 0-4 against USC, each loss worse than the last. That did him in as much as anything.
The UCLA players found out about his dismissal on Twitter and ESPN. How much will the emotion of their head coach’s last game effect their motivation against the Ducks?
Last week they lost to the Trojans 50-0, with Matt Barkley throwing six touchdown passes. Last year, they lost to Oregon in a nationally-televised Thursday night game, 60-13. The Bruins didn’t score a touchdown until the end of the game.
But Rick Neuheisel has a story to tell about impossible upsets and long odds.
Neuheisel was a walk-on as a player, who went from running the scout team to holder to the starter in his senior year. He won the job in fall camp but the team started miserably, going 0-3-1 with a blowout loss to Nebraska. Steve Bono took over, then got hurt against Stanford.
Young Rick Neuheisel led the Bruins to a 6-1 finish, edging out WSU for the right to meet #4 Illinois in the ’84 Rose Bowl. The 10-1 Illini, led by quarterback Jack Trudeau, were huge favorites.
Five Bruins players woke up the morning of the game with food poisoning, Neuheisel so ill that Terry Donahue sent him to the game in a private car. He didn’t want the other players to see their quarterback puking and sweating before the game.
And the former walk-on played the game of his life, 22-31 for 298 yards with four touchdown passes, two to Dorrell, in a 45-9 upset. The Bruins picked Trudeau three times. Rick Neuheisel was the Rose Bowl MVP.
The golden boy was golden as a young man. He graduated from the USC law school in 1988, passed the bar in 1991. In ’94 he became the country’s youngest division one head coach, succeeding Bill McCartney at Colorado.
Confident and brash, Neuheisel became a target among Oregon fans after several run-ins, faking a punt at the Cotton Bowl, deriding Coach Bellotti after a narrow win in the Aloha Bowl, his players dancing on the O in Autzen Stadium while at Washington. He created the mythical Northwest Championship. He skirted around NCAA rules and flirted with the 49’ers and bet thousands in a March Madness pool. Recruiting violations followed in his wake. One of his players crashed his car into a nursing home, and Neuheisel suspended him for a half.
At UCLA, he was 21-28. Today athletic director Dan Guerrero announced that Friday will be his last game.
The lame duck coach told the Los Angeles Times, “I will talk to the players this afternoon and make sure they know this is not about me, it’s about us.”
He has four days to prepare his team for a run at another impossible Rose Bowl.
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