Very Upsetting

Bad news, Bears. Four minutes into the fourth quarter of a game last Saturday in which UCLA had not led, Bruins junior fullback Ed Ieremia-Stansbury fumbled at the Michigan 31. The Wolverines, leading 20-17 in their first regular-season game at the Rose Bowl since 1989, recovered. If Michigan scored, UCLA was toast.

But the Wolverines were forced to punt to the Bruins, who were quarterbacked by redshirt sophomore Ryan McCann, a raw but resilient southpaw who had kept his chin up despite being benched and publicly criticized by coach Bob Toledo a week earlier. McCann's father, John, incidentally, is an actor whose body of work includes a brief but heartwarming turn in a Viagra commercial. So the McCann men know a little something about rising from the dead.

Ryan drove UCLA 83 yards to the Michigan two, where he called a play-action pass to Ieremia-Stansbury. The dreadlocked Texan's touchdown catch with 6:30 left more than made up for his fumble and clinched a 23-20 win—the Bruins' second stunning upset in three weeks and further proof that the beleaguered Pac-10 is a force again (chart, page 70). The Wolverines entered the game ranked third in the country, only because UCLA had knocked Alabama from that spot two weeks earlier, physically dominating the Crimson Tide in a 35-24 win.

Last Saturday, when the temperature on the field reached 118�, turning the Rose Bowl into a giant wok, the Bruins scorched the national championship hopes of Michigan, primarily because their No. 2 quarterback was better than the Wolverines'. But that's not how it had figured to play out.

Michigan's 6'6" redshirt freshman passer John Navarre, who had been thrust into the starting job after Drew Henson broke a bone in his right foot 10 days before the season opener, entered the game against UCLA with the nation's best pass-efficiency rating (238.8), having feasted on Bowling Green and Rice in the Wolverines' first two games. McCann went up against Michigan with his ears still burning from the criticism Toledo had leveled at him a week earlier.

After having been beaten out of the starting job by Cory Paus in preseason practice, McCann got a break when Paus separated his right shoulder during the Bruins' first series against Alabama. While McCann came on to lead UCLA to victory, he was inconsistent in that game as well as in the Bruins' 24-21 defeat of Fresno State a week later. He would look like Steve Young on one play and Stevie Nicks on the next. Toledo even benched him for the second half of the Fresno State game, inserting third-teamer Scott McEwan, a junior. Afterward, rather than fib to the media to spare McCann's feelings, as most coaches not named Spurrier would have done, Toledo merrily ticked off all the ways in which McCann had stunk—poor reads, bad audibles, missed blitzes—and blamed him for everything but the brutal traffic on I-405.

There was a method to this meanness, Toledo explained. The idea was to ratchet up McCann's focus—to forcefully make the point that, as he told McCann, "potential doesn't matter anymore. Performance matters."

"I figured if the criticism didn't kill me, it would make me stronger," McCann said last Saturday.

That sentiment applies to the entire UCLA team, which is coming off the mother of all nightmare seasons. The Bruins' seven defeats in 11 games only scratched the surface of what they lost. The revelation that 10 players had abused handicapped-parking placards turned the UCLA players into poster boys for spoiled, insensitive athletes.

Rather than fragmenting, however, the Bruins came together. The number of players who stayed on campus over the summer to participate in off-season workouts increased sharply. Perhaps the most inspiring member of that group was junior flanker Freddie Mitchell, who plays with a titanium rod in his right femur, which had snapped clean through when he was tackled on a kickoff return in 1998. Mitchell looks on the bright side: The speed he initially lost—he insists he has gained it back—forced him to run more precise routes. A gifted outfielder and draftee of the Chicago White Sox, Mitchell has thrown three option passes for touchdowns while at UCLA Whenever Bruins quarterbacks struggle, Toledo is urged by fans to put Mitchell under center.