Wednesday News & Notes

Over at What’s Bruin, Rich Perleman has some interesting posts that are worth taking note of. Let’s start with a note on scheduling. Apparently Minnesota’s head coach Tim Brewster is interested in scheduling a home and home with UCLA:

Last year I wrote a post on what interesting match-ups Bruin football may want to take on down the road. Suggestions included teams like Virginia, Boston College, LSU, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and North Carolina. I’d be more than happy to see UCLA play an early September game at Minnesota. I hear Twin Cities is a fun place to visit during Fall with lots of good eats, beers, and cool down to earth folks from Midwest.

I am all for it. And I hope UCLA is open to the idea.

Also staying on football theme, Perleman has a hype piece on former Bruin Eric Scott, who joined Dorrell’s staff this season. Eric has zero experience as an NCAA assistant coach but because of his connections to LA schools as a former assistant high school coach, he has been able to made some good contributions in recruiting: As we have said before. All this recruiting success is cool. But none of it is going to matter if Dorrell fails to win a Pac-10 championship. So I will reserve my judgment on Eric Scott until I see how UCLA performs this season. And one of the factors I will be closely looking into see is how the messed up WR unit (which became a joke under the leadership of a HC with experience as an "NFL WR coach") performs this season.

Coach Scott’s responsibilities will include making sure that the WR rotation actually optimizes the talent already available on roster. We certainly don’t want to see a bizarre rotation in which we saw a walkon like Andrew Baumgartner (God bless him for all his efforts) getting more reps than talents like Junior Taylor, who became increasingly frustrated with Dorrell’s impotent offense through the season.

We are already reading stories of glorified walkons this off-season. I sure hope Scott and rest of Dorrell’s staff actually uses the talent available to them and not fall into Lavin’s pathetic (and bizarre) "lucky charm" tactic of giving more time to well meaning (but not athletically gifted) athletes such as Sean Farnham, Rico Hines of the world while wasting the talents of kids like Barnes, Thompson, Bozeman et al. You get the picture.

Anyways, we will end with a good note from the LAT blog. This is not news to any of us but Perleman has some numbers showing how UCLA Athletes are really smart. One of the superstars include Chris Jospeh, who will be the starting C this coming season, who has the best overall GPA of any UCLA athlete who’s been in school for two or more years at 3.969. Not too shabby Chris.

Hopefully your head coach can match your class room standard of excellence by achieving similar success on the field this coming season.

GO BRUINS.