Before I post my initial notes and thoughts on the BYU Cougars, I wanted to bring to your attention the dominant topic that has been exploding like fire crackers in every corner of the internets, talk radio, and television dealing with college football: Michigan's epic loss to Appalachian State. I believe there is a Bruin angle to this story.

Obviously, a lot of Michigan fans took the loss very hard and some of them are still trying to figure out how to deal with the embarrassment of losing to some non D-1 team.

One particular Michigan alum though - Joey at Straight Bangin' - whose writing I have highlighted here on BN in previous years, posted these thoughts, that I thought were very germane to what we often talk about wrt UCLA football program (and would have about our basketball program as well if we were around during the Lavin years). Here is Joey (emphasis mine throughout):

And I will pile this on from my SBN colleague Maize n Brew Dave: I certainly hope 2-3 years from now we don't have to go back and look up those posts to formulate our thoughts on our football program if it craters like the Michigan team did on Saturday or Lavin's basketball team did four years ago.

The sad thing is given the incredible talent the Wolverines have on offense and given the mediocrity of the Big-10, I can still see this team rebounding from that horrific loss and end up having a 8-9 win season, which may just be enough to save Carr's job given what he has done at Ann Arbor.

Sounds familiar? It reminds me of having to suffer through Donahue football in his later years when he was being able to stick around despite being an all around horrific and uninspiring head coach because of the Rose Bowl victories he accumulated early in the season.

Anyways, that post reminded me of posts on UCLA message boards during the days after the UCLA basketball team lost to CSUN at Pauley.

I know we haven't reached our final verdict on Karl Dorrell. I know we have to wait for a while to get our answers on whether Dorrell can deliver a money season at UCLA, which he can use as a base to replicate successful seasons in the coming years.

What we do know is that many of us here may never have been coaches in our real lives, but at this point we are experienced enough after following and obsessing about our football and basketball programs on a day-to-day basis, to know whether they are well coached, well prepared to be successful on the short team and long term basis.

Currently, the data point doesn't favor Dorrell. And a blowout win over a pathetic Stanford team doesn't do much to change the big picture. Dorrell still has to put together a season in which his team plays like a well-coached and well-prepared team on a week-to-week basis, finally delivering at least a BCS bowl game in his fifth season. And, even if he does deliver a 10 win season, we will have to take very close look at how those 10 wins came, so that we don't allow it to be spun as a "successful" and "gratifying" season as the "10 win" season from 2 years ago in which desperate, come-from-behind wins against lesser teams, hid the deficiencies of a mediocre football team. And even if Dorrell delivers that "Show Me" Season, that doesn't mean he gets a pass for sliding back to mediocrity of his previous four seasons. He needs to bring it every year and if he doesn't he needs to hear from us.

In other words, we have to stay vigilant.

We can't get complacent after few cheap wins. It sounds like certain Michigan football fans are getting their due, despite seeing all the signs in years of timid, self-defeating, predictable, naive football. In that Michigan loss there are some prescient signs and valuable lessons for everyone who loves UCLA football. I wanted to make sure no one misses those signs when it comes to our football program in this particular Nation.

GO BRUINS.