UCLA Football: Chipping away the “gutty” persona

Despite having an embarrassment of natural resources, the UCLA Football program has struggled to ascend to the top of the college football mountain. Much of that starts with shedding and rejection of the “gutty little Bruins” tagline.

The UCLA Football program is currently at a fork in the road. Should the Bruins continue straight ahead? Should they continue on the path they’ve been on for almost 100 years? Or should they begin to veer?

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Straying from the path has plenty of risks and there’s comfort in the familiar. However, if the Bruins are ever going to reach their full potential, and there’s no reason they can’t, they’re going to have to get the nation to forget almost a century of history.

Let’s look at the first major contributor to the “gutty little Bruins” perception.

Even before the establishment of the UCLA Football team as we know it today, the University itself struggled to break free of it’s “secondary” status. Originally called the “Southern Branch”, UCLA first functioned as a satellite campus for the University of California, later to be known as UC Berkeley.