Jayne Kamin-Oncea-US PRESSWIRE
We’re all guilty.
We’re guilty of being UCLA fans who had seen light at the end of a 10-year long tunnel. We’re guilty of having hope that Jim Mora had truly changed the culture and the 2006-2011 UCLA Bruins were buried.
And we’re guilty of acting like we had arrived.
Don’t lie to me: You’ve been on those USC message boards, and were probably flooding the damn things when the Bruins pounded on Houston in LA while Trojans fans were left standing in the cold in Palo Alto following their loss to Stanford. You were there with me.
You stood there in the Rose Bowl, chanting “Fuck SC!” with me for three straight minutes as the PA guy gave us the final score. You were there with me, heckling Nebraska fans that walked by us as we kicked their asses and made sure they had a bad taste in their mouth when they left Los Angeles for Omaha.
I’ve done my fair share of heckling and shit-talking and being arrogant.
And this loss to California, a 43-17 ass-whooping, has come back to bite us in the ass, and we deserve it.
And now, here we are, looking like the clown of the Pac-12 once more. While teams like Arizona and Washington lose badly to the top team in the nation in Oregon but stay competitive and/or beat other ranked Pac-12 teams, and while ASU, Stanford, and Oregon State are moving on up, UCLA is left in the cold and the fans are left embarrassed. Again, because this is what it’s like to bleed Bruin Blue and Gold.
Because we give that, “Bitch, please” stare to the teams we beat, we deserve to have that done to us, and when someone tells us to sit down and shut the hell up, we better listen, because we’re the whipping boys of the Pac again.
Things don’t look so rosy now for UCLA either, after this unraveling. Winning the Pac-12 South is totally out of the equation and our bowl eligibility is entirely in danger.
So let’s stay quiet from now on, before we become the fans we never were.