For Bruins, essentials are barely there

Do you see improvement?

Have the 2008 UCLA football Bruins come to understand what it takes to run and pass and take advantage of slight cracks at opportunity?

Are they appreciably better now than they were against Fresno State or Arizona or California? (Note: I'm leaving Brigham Young -- 59-0 -- out of this rhetorical query as an act of kindness.)

I have written several times this year about how what matters most in Rick Neuheisel's honeymoon season will be small signs that the Bruins are inching forward, even if inching forward does not necessarily lead to many wins.

Well, right now -- on a warm night at the Rose Bowl as I watch the Bruins get poleaxed once again -- I have to say that that when it comes to the kind of tangible improvements that most of us look for, I'm not seeing any.

Oregon State was the season's ninth game. We've got real perspective now, a true measure of a team that teased its fans with that first-week upset and then proceeded to knock all wind from the sails with a gunked-up season in which there been no more than a handful of outstanding moments.

This was the ninth game, but it looked like the third, the fourth, the eighth.

Offense? There's still little to none of it. No sustained drives of any magnitude. (As I write this -- third quarter, Bruins down 17-3 -- the public address announcer just solemnly told the crowd that with that last completed pass, the Bruins are now one for 10 on third downs, which was met by derisive applause.)

Defense? It's still all over the map: very good at first, then average, and then, as the legs tire from being on the field all day with little break, pretty bad.

Coaching? Neuheisel and Norm Chow, the big guns who rode into Westwood promising a new day, seem to have no clue how to reach the offense and also seem generally befuddled.

"We just got our butts handed to us," said Chow, standing in a corner of the locker room after the 34-6 loss.

A question came: Are you getting better?

His face tightened. "No, I felt like we were improving a couple of games ago, but we have flattened off. . . . The guys are trying hard, we are just not getting it done. . . . [The last few games] we played some awfully good teams, a lot more mature and older teams. . . . You don't make excuses, you just keep fighting." (Yes, that last part of the quote, about UCLA playing good, veteran teams, did seem like an excuse, even though Chow followed by saying there were no excuses, but as noted above, he seems befuddled.)