FINISH LINE: Learning to lose
Published 12:01 am Monday, November 30, 2009
Southern Cal head coach Pete Carroll was upgraded to gold status in the run-it-up club when he requisitioned a touchdown bomb to stick it in UCLA’s ear in a 28-7 win Saturday night.
The teams nearly came to blows in Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, ignited by Rick Neuheisel’s rueful decision to call time to prolong a game that was already decided.
Neuheisel could use a lesson in defeat management. In 2007, North Texas lost a game at Oklahoma, 79-10, in part because Todd Dodge, the North Texas coach, kept passing the ball.
“They had no plan for losing,” former Oklahoma coach Barry Switzer explained later. “When you can’t win the game, you need to run the clock, don’t let it stop, don’t throw incomplete passes. Get on the bus and go home.”
UCLA needed to get on the bus.
The sophomore UCLA coach should not have called time out to extend the game, but what Carroll did could only have been worse had he incited a riot that resulted in black eyes and arrests.
Neuheisel was the guy who yelled ‘fire!’ in a crowded theater, but Carroll actually had the gasoline and matches.
