The same shadows that partially cover the Bevo logo above will blanket both the Texas Longhorns and the UCLA Bruins this Saturday at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Tex. UCLA and Texas will play in the shadows of history, and one of the most significant college football games from the 1990s.
When the Bruins and Longhorns take the field inside JerryWorld, they will mark the 17th anniversary of the 1997 UCLA-Texas game in Austin. Bevo was slaughtered that day, and yet, in one of those great paradoxes which emerges in sports from time to time, the team that lost by 63 points was the team that truly won that day. It’s exactly why the renewal of Bruins-Longhorns feels like a significant event, despite UCLA’s clunky start and Texas’s utter impotence, the result of injuries to quarterback David Ash and center Dominic Espinosa. In order to understand where these programs are now, you have to take that journey 17 years into the past. In so many ways, this game is a bookend event for both schools, especially Texas.
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John Mackovic won multiple conference titles at Texas: the first Big 12 title in 1996, and the last Southwest Conference crown, captured here in 1995 after a win over Texas A&M in College Station.
Texas football found it very hard to recover from a 10-9 loss to Georgia in the 1984 Cotton Bowl. That one-point stomach punch hijacked what remained of the Fred Akers era and sent the program into a prolonged depression. A Cotton Bowl season in 1990 briefly interrupted the gloom which settled over the program, but a thrashing endured at the hands of the Miami Hurricanes made it hard for the Longhorns to feel too good about what they had accomplished.
In 1995 and 1996, though, Texas regained a place in the New Year’s spotlight, reaching the Sugar and Fiesta Bowls at the end of those two seasons. John Mackovic, formerly the coach of the Kansas City Chiefs, unfurled one of the best situational play calls in college football history in the inaugural Big 12 Championship Game in 1996. “Roll left,” the fourth-and-short play in which Texas snookered Nebraska with a surprise pass for 61 yards, denied Nebraska the chance to win a third straight national title. It opened the door for Steve Spurrier to win his first and only national title at Florida when Arizona State lost to Ohio State in the Rose Bowl. Mackovic engineered some memorable moments at Texas. He gave the program the lasting satisfaction of winning the final Southwest Conference title in 1995, before the league died.
Yet, as Mackovic’s predecessors could have told him, greatness at Texas is supposed to be sustained, not fleeting, and when Mackovic led the Longhorns onto the gridiron against UCLA on Sept. 13, 1997, he quickly realized that his previous two seasons were more aberration than indicator, more of a tease than a telltale sign that Texas had reclaimed a place as an entrenched national power.
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Tim Griffin, a longtime chronicler of the Big 12 who now works for My San Antonio, wrote about UCLA’s 66-3 detonation of Bevo for ESPN.com, providing the contest’s immediate details and aftermath. Everything Griffin writes about this game is accurate, including his reference to the fact that the 63-point rout did serve as something of a launching pad for UCLA under Bob Toledo, the successor to one of the legendary coaches in Pac-12 history, Terry Donahue.
It was Donohue who battled Washington’s Don James for West Coast supremacy through much of the 1980s and early ’90s. If John McKay and John Robinson owned the 1970s at USC, Donohue and James stood above the crowd until they both stepped away from coaching in the mid-1990s, with Larry Smith of USC enjoying a fruitful period in the late 1980s. Programs can’t count on having that special coach who brings one and a half to two decades of high-level consistency. UCLA found that man in Donahue. When the Bruins took Texas to the woodshed on Sept. 13, 1997, they had reason to think they would continue to remain a constant force in what was then the Pac-10.
For 20 seasons, UCLA football rested in the capable hands — and mind — of Terry Donahue. The Bruins have been looking for an “Answer Man” of comparable quality ever since. UCLA’s rout of Texas, instead of pointing the way to a sustained place atop the Pac-12, has reminded the Bruins and their fan base of what they once had… and are trying to win back in 2014.
Yet, on a late-season afternoon in Miami in 1998, the Bruins — one win away from being able to play in the first-ever BCS championship game, the 1999 Fiesta Bowl against Tennessee — couldn’t play a lick of defense against the Hurricanes. UCLA played like a team that was carrying the weight of a certain degree of sadness against Wisconsin in the 1999 Rose Bowl, the consolation prize it didn’t really want.
The Bruins haven’t been the same since.
UCLA derived a tangible benefit from “66-3,” but those benefits were short-lived. Texas is the team which paradoxically gained so much more on Sept. 13, 1997… even though it had to absorb the sour taste of a 63-point beatdown.
Authoritative losses in the midst of on-the-fence seasons can acquire a marvelously clarifying and cleansing dimension. Losing by 10 points can seem pedestrian and respectable, but it still demonstrates a certain measure of inadequacy. Losing by 63 convinces the whole person — mind, heart and gut; emotions and intellect — that a coach is not a long-term solution. Such was the case with Mackovic, who was never able to escape the shadow of “66-3.”
The rest, as they say, is history.
Recall the need for a coach who can take hold of a program for a decade and a half or longer, bringing a steady parade of conquests to a proud football school? Texas — from that moment of darkness 17 years ago — gained Mack Brown and eventually recorded nine straight seasons with at least 10 wins, two of them good for a berth in the BCS National Championship Game, one of them capped by a national title. From its moment of poverty and barrenness against UCLA, Texas started on a new road to riches. The Bruins, so close to making the biggest of big stages one season after this 1997 catapult, have wandered in the sport’s wilderness throughout the 21st century.
Sports can be fascinating that way.
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We’re now brought to the present moment and the bookend to the Mack Brown era at Texas. If Brown was ushered into Austin by “66-3,” this UCLA-Texas reunion, with the Longhorns reeling and in search of a spark, gives new coach Charlie Strong a chance to build something fresh from the frailty and malaise Brown left behind in his final, feeble seasons. UCLA, a team picked by some to make the College Football Playoff, has played like a team that is burdened — anything but liberated — by sky-high expectations. If the Bruins want to return to their 1997 and 1998 heights, this would mark a great moment in which to make a statement. Jim Mora, Jr., is the man being asked to lift UCLA back to the Donahue salad days. A loss to Texas would scuttle Mora’s plans before they have a chance to get off the ground.
UCLA. Texas. Another intersection of history and opportunity, of hope and the shadows of the past.
Neither team has stirred the senses or offered cause for optimism this season. Yet, the historical backdrop to this game — 17 years in the making — imbues Bruins-Horns with a freshness many of Saturday’s other week-three offerings can’t match.
