A season in review.
It was never fair, saddling Rick Neuheisel with the "Monopoly" ad before he'd ever coached a game at UCLA. The program he inherited in 2008 was nowhere near the juggernaut Pete Carroll had built across town, and Neuheisel never asked for the comparison. As it turned out, though, the stunt wasn't just an embarrassing bit of hubris: The comparison to USC gave the Bruins an explicit measuring stick for progress under the new regime, and with it, a convenient shorthand for just how thoroughly Neuheisel's doomed tenure fell short of the mark.
That was clear enough on the field. Coming into this season, UCLA had dropped four straight in the series, all by double digits, even as the Trojans struggled through their own bout with mediocrity in the wake of NCAA sanctions. The 50-0 bomb USC dropped on the Bruins in November only drove home the reality: Not only had the gap between the Trojans and the Bruins not closed on Neuheisel's watch, but the Bruins were even deeper in the hole than they were before.
After two years in the desert, USC's brief decline suddenly seemed like a thing of the past; after four years under Neuheisel, UCLA had been trounced in the series by a combined score of 134 to 28.
Throwing the margin into even sharper relief, there was also the fact that Neuheisel had ostensibly made the Bruins more competitive in recruiting, especially in head-to-head battles for local talent in Southern California.
By Rivals' count, Neuheisel pulled in twice as many players with four or five-star ratings in his first three classes (36) as his predecessor, Karl Dorrell, managed to sign in his last four. Twice as many of that number came from the greater L.A. area. All three of those classes ranked second to USC's in the Pac-10, and all three finished among the top 20 classes nationally.
In 2009, the Bruins swiped three Trojan targets on signing day — receiver Randall Carroll, tight end Morrell Presley and offensive lineman Xavier Su'a Filo, all four-star kids ranked among Rivals' top 100 prospects in the nation — convincing one of the major scouting sites to rank the class among the top five nationally, ahead of a USC crop that featured Matt Barkley and five other current Trojan starters. UCLA's next class landed in the top 10 according to every major site in 2010, less than a month after Pete Carroll's abrupt exit from USC.{YSP:MORE}
Going into his third season, then, Neuheisel boasted a roster stocked with well-regarded players that he brought to campus, across town from a weakened nemesis that had just lost the architect of its success between the end of its worst season in nearly a decade and the arrival of the most heavy-handed NCAA sanctions in 25 years. When that team went belly-up in 2010, Year Four was almost redundant. UCLA was the worst kind of mediocrity: A bad team that, on paper, should have been pretty good.
His apparent success as a recruiter is important for putting Neuheisel's failure to put a quality outfit on the field in context. Not only did his teams fail to challenge for a conference title with athletes most Pac-12 coaches would have taken in a heartbeat: Against the best teams in the conference, they weren't even competitive. USC dominated the rivalry in all facets. Oregon took four straight by an average score of 41 to 19. Stanford won three in a row, the last two in lopsided blowouts. Over the course of Neuheisel's tenure, UCLA dropped at least one game by at least three touchdowns to Arizona, Arizona State, California, Oregon State and Utah — two-thirds of the conference.
Out of those three well-regarded recruiting classes — crops that were remarkable for the lack of attrition under "Slick Rick" — only one player signed by Neuheisel came in for an all-conference nod: Safety Rahim Moore in 2009 and 2010. (Moore is also the only Neuheisel recruit to date to go in the NFL Draft.) Three years in, the hyped '09 class has produced three regular starters: Offensive lineman Greg Capella, cornerback Sheldon Price and safety Dalton Hilliard. The less said about the four-star quarterback in that crop, Richard Brehaut, the better.
We can say this about the 2011 offense: With two experienced quarterbacks, a veteran front line and literally every player who touched the ball in 2010 at their disposal, the Bruins still finished 85th nationally at a little below 24 points per game. The defense, stocked with nine players who came into the season with significant starting experience, finished 91st in total defense, 95th in scoring and yielded at least 31 points in all seven losses. Four years in, Neuheisel had his players in his program, and was still pleading to get anyone to care.
It didn't take incoming coach Jim Mora long to recognize apathy and lack of commitment as the tallest hurdles he faces in his first year, or to start telling reporters that "the culture of UCLA football needs to change". After watching the team on film, he cited "changing the mindset" as his first priority — one to which he should be uniquely suited as the first outsider in charge of the program in 60 years. If he figures out to do that, he'll be the first in a long, long time. But there are no more illusions about where he's starting from.
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Matt Hinton is on Facebook and Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.