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UCLA Gameday Bruin Bites: Preparing For the Sun Devils

News and notes as UCLA Football prepares to take on Arizona State tonight in Tempe.

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Rick Scuteri-US PRESSWIRE

Gameday is here. Later tonight, the Bruins will be taking the field in Tempe to take on Arizona State. Kickoff is scheduled for 7pm Pacific time at Sun Devil Stadium, with the television broadcast being carried by Fox Sports 1 - Tim Brando, Joel Klatt and Jenny Taft calling the action for FS1 - and Chris Roberts, Matt Stevens and Wayne Cook on the radio broadcast as usual for AM570 and other stations on the Bruin Radio Network. For folks outside of SoCal and/or stuck without a decent radio signal, the Bruin audio feed will available for free streaming via the TuneIn Radio app.

With this being the first big game of the year for Fox Sports 1, the network brought out one of their big guns for a few words. No, he won't be calling the game tonight, but the network did ask Troy Aikman to share a few words for the start of the Pac-12 season and the start of the Fall Quarter in Westwood.

Chris Foster shared his talking points and thoughts on tonight's game, noting that yes, the Bruin O-Line needs to do a better job protecting the QB and that D.J Foster is a guy the defense needs to watch out for. Coy Wire brings up some more insightful issues for UCLA to work on in his piece for Fox Sports (auto-playing video alert!).

Jack Wang discusses the intrigue of tonight's game in his gameday story for the Daily News, from the status of Brett Hundley to the effect of tonight's game on a wide-open race for the Pac-12 South. The Arizona Republic's Doug Haller looks for some of the questions surrounding the retooled Sun Devil defense to be answered tonight.

In the other kind of Bruin-related football (or futbol), Fox Sports' Leander Schaerlaeckens wrote a piece on Sydney Leroux and her development as a soccer player, from leaving home as a teenager and deciding to represent the USA instead of her native Canada to her early impact on the national team and at UCLA.

In the broader world of college football, Alabama has had their usual dominant start to the season, and also as expected, reporters have already begun fluffing new Bama OC Lane Kiffin. After having some fun ridiculing the Alabama writer who already thinks that the kitten should be Nick Saban's eventual replacement, Gregg Doyel noted how Hello Kifin fooled him while he was OC and later the newly-hired head coach at Southern Cal. He also shared how Saban reminded the reporters this week that instead of giving Lane all the credit for the high scoring offense in Tuscaloosa, they should keep in mind that Bama has a few kinda talented players on their roster who can do special things with a football regardless of who is wearing the visor on the sideline.