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Bruin Bites: Dan Guerrero and Rick Neuheisel Must Go Edition

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It's Sunday afternoon, and hopefully, you've spent the weekend watching football teams that actually had real coaching and, more importantly, the support of an athletic department and university that actually care about having a successful program. Unless and until UCLA decides to dump Dan Guerrero and give Neuheisel the axe, Bruin football is going to continue as a mediocre embarrassment to our great alma mater.

I mean, does anyone else see the irony in this?  UCLA does pretty much everything phenomenally.  Academically, we're one of the top universities in the entire world (see here (#34), here (#2), here (#34), here (#13), and here (#13) . . . also note how much further below U$C is, and yet they talk so much).  Athletically, we have more national championships than any other university, you know, "First to 100" and all of that.  We are a national title contender in every sport we contend in every year (including men's basketball under Howland, except for the last few seasons), except for one: football.

We're in a BCS conference.  We have a football program than dominated in the 1980s and 1990s.  We produced countless players in the NFL, including some of the best the game has ever seen (read: Troy Aikman, Jonathan Ogden, Ken Norton Jr., etc.).  UCLA sits in the second largest media market in the United States and is in the middle of a recruiting hot-bed.  Even with U$C across town, there's so many elite prospects in Southern California that both programs should be able to stock up with top talent.  In short, there's no excuse for why we suck at football.  None.  Zero.

Except, we have an athletic director who isn't a football guy, who came from a small-time sister UC school (Irvine) with no football program and nothing close to the level of excellence we expect at UCLA.  He's bought into the diseased culture of mediocrity at Morgan Center, where people think doing things the "UCLA way" is the right way: that we can pay coaches with UCLA ties on the cheap and that we don't need to aggressively market our program because we're UCLA and the kids should just want to come here and that's that.

Make no mistake about it: UCLA will continue to be a joke unless and until we get serious about football.  That means that Dan Guerrero must be fired or resign immediately and Rick Neuheisel must be fired or resign immediately.

Both guys are UCLA guys.  They were good Bruins and they should be applauded for what they did in their time as UCLA student athletes.  But they don't get it.  Rick has become a conservative shell of his former self and if Thursday showed us anything, he has no control over this program, and there's nothing resembling "coaching" going on at Spaulding.  Not when you lose to a 1-5 program with a guy coaching his first game ever as the boss.  Dan used to play baseball for the Bruins, yet our baseball program, with one of the nation's best coaches, has broken-down decrepit facilities that are not even on par with other Pac-12 programs, let alone the college baseball powers in the SEC.  When you look around at UCLA athletics, we succeed in spite of our athletic department and in spite of the diseased culture of mediocrity at Morgan Center.

When you look at UCLA athletics, it's clear that it's time for wholesale regime change, starting with Dan Guerrero.

It's been a long few days since our last edition of Bruin Bites.  What's sad is that this is not even the first time that Bruin Bites had a special "Dan and Rick fail" edition.  With those thoughts, let's turn to some other bits and pieces of news coming from around the UCLA-iverse after the jump:

With that, those are your Bruin Bites for the end of this fall weekend free of the embarrassment of UCLA football.  It's been a long decade of irrelevance for UCLA football and it's time for wholesale regime change.  We'll check in tomorrow with all the news and results from our non-revenue programs.  For now, fire away with your thoughts, comments, and additions in the comment thread.

GO BRUINS