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TROY IS BURNING.
Oh, how glorious this Monday morning is, especially for all of you who will return to work with once-proud and once-smug, but now defeated and demoralized Trojans. The curse of Lane Kiffin lives on: a little more than a week after he gave his ringing endorsement for his former assistant to be his permanent replacement at Southern Cal, Ed Orgeron and the Trojans went out and got demolished by our Bruins. Thanks Lane! There isn't much more than can be said that hasn't been covered repeatedly in the last 24 hours of wonderful post-victory celebration, so let's get right to the various bits and pieces of news from around the UCLA-iverse as we get this amazing post-victory work week started:
- Beginning with last night's victory over Southern Cal, the Los Angeles Times took a look at how Lou Spanos' defensive stars have been coming to the rescue on the offensive side of the ball, with freshman defensive lineman Eddie Vanderdoes, scoring on the William "The Refrigerator" Perry play dialed up from the Trojan one-yard line.
- But the victory was short-lived for Coach Jim Mora and his staff, who will now need to hit the road and try to parlay this weekend's big win into victories on the recruiting trail. Mora and his staff wasted no time, hitting the road for in-home visits beginning on Sunday.
- That being said, there's no person more worth recruiting that redshirt sophomore QB Brett Hundley, who is surely looking long and hard at putting his name in the mix for the upcoming NFL Draft, despite some shortcomings in his game that an additional year of refinement would do wonders to fix (andLarry Brown Sports seems to agree). And Mora isn't shy about trying to lock his starting QB into next year, giving Hundley a hint and nudge immediately following the game. Let's keep our fingers crossed that #17 will be back to make it a three-peat over the Trojans.
- Following up on the same story, Dan Greenspan at NFL.com discussed Hundley and his looming decision re: the NFL Draft, noting that Hundley has all the physical tools to be an NFL QB, but taking note of some comments from Mazzone about areas that Brett really needs to improve on before jumping to the professional ranks.
- Looking to the future, the Los Angeles Times discussed a couple of bowl placement projections depending on the results of some of next week's games, settling on the Sun Bowl as the most likely destination for UCLA. Let's see if the Bruins can ride this wave to one last victory to get us our 10th of the year.
- Finally, it looks like the Trojan faithful are getting desperate: nothing reeks of desperation more than trying to make a splashy hire just a few days after being punked out by your rival on national television. And according to WWL's Joe Schad, Southern Cal is looking at Boise State's Chris Petersen and Vanderbilt's James Franklin as it's top two options (what happened in that interview with Jack Del Rio?) and we all know Petersen is too enamored with the Boise lifestyle to leave, so don't be shocked if Franklin is named as the Trojans' new head coach sometime in the next few days, with Orgeron being retained in some capacity as an extremely well paid assistant - sounds a lot like the failed force marriage of Neuheisel-Walker-Chow by Chianti Dan. This could turn out quite well for us.
Alright folks, those are your bits and pieces of news from around the UCLA-iverse as we celebrate the first day of Bruin Victory Week. Lock the gates folks and let's burn this motherf**ker down! Fire away with your comments, additions, etc. in the thread as you enjoy your first day back at work following our Bruins big victory over the Trojans.
GO BRUINS