PASADENA, Calif. –“Never any doubt,” Rashad Bauman said. “Wide right all the way.”
Chris Griffith’s last-second, 50-yard field goal couldn’t find the uprights in front of 78,330 fans at the Rose Bowl on Saturday, perhaps — even if it is a long shot — setting up another Oregon trip to Pasadena on Jan. 3 for the National Championship.
“You’ll probably call me a liar, but the whole time, we were saying ‘wide right, it was going to go wide right,’” said Bauman, a senior defensive back, after Oregon’s 21-20 victory over UCLA. “We were so relaxed and so calm.
“And I was sitting in the huddle, and I was like, ‘What the hell’s going on? Why’s everyone so relaxed?’ As we came up we were just laughing, and we knew it would go wide right.”
The Bruins — playing without star DeShaun Foster, the nation’s third-best rusher who was suspended for receiving “extra benefits” — weren’t laughing after their third straight loss dropped them from a national championship contender into the bottom half of the Pacific-10 Conference.
The No. 7 Ducks (9-1 overall, 6-1 Pac-10), celebrating the 500th victory in program history, now have three weeks to prepare for the Dec. 1 Civil War against Oregon State. A win in the final game of the regular season would clinch at least a berth to the Fiesta Bowl for the Ducks.
Oregon vaulted to fourth in the Bowl Championship Series standings after the win. But there would be no talk of Oregon in the BCS now if Griffith, UCLA’s junior placekicker, had made his first career 50-yard field goal attempt with two ticks remaining on the clock.
UCLA got to the Oregon 33-yard line in the final drive of the game, and on third-and-five with 0:43 left, Akil Harris tried to get to the corner and out of bounds, only to meet up with Oregon linebacker Wesly Mallard, who stopped Harris and kept the clock running. Even with two timeouts remaining, UCLA head coach Bob Toledo opted to let the clock run down and give the game to Griffith, whose career-long field goal is a 49-yard kick.
“If he makes it, they deserve to win,” Oregon head coach Mike Bellotti said after Oregon’s first win at the Rose Bowl since 1995. “(But) forcing them to kick a 50-yard field goal, I felt good about our opportunities in that situation. Any field goal over about 42 yards, in my mind, is questionable.”
After UCLA quarterback Cory Paus threw an interception to Oregon’s Steve Smith to end UCLA’s previous drive, Toledo said he didn’t want to risk turning the ball over again to end the game.
“I wanted to kick a field goal,” Toledo said. “It would have been a great ending. (Griffith) has done it before (in practice). He just hit it a little fat.”
Paus finished the game with a season-high 321 yards passing, despite two interceptions, including one by Bauman.
“I expected them to go deep at least once,” Bauman said of UCLA’s decision to run the clock down. “But I’m glad they didn’t.”
After leading 14-10 at the half, the Ducks found themselves down 20-14 after UCLA’s Manuel White scored a touchdown early in the fourth quarter.
Acting as if he already had eight fourth-quarter comebacks in his career, Joey Harrington led the Ducks on a 70-yard drive to give them the one-point lead at the 9:56 mark. The big play of the drive was a Harrington pass to tight end Justin Peelle, who stepped out of bounds at the UCLA four-yard-line for a 34-yard gain.
Three running plays later, the Ducks were only three yards closer to the end zone. But on the ensuing fourth-and-goal, with the Bruins defense stuffing the box, Harrington found senior fullback Josh Line open for the game-winning touchdown pass.
“It was kind of a lob pass,” Line said of his first touchdown of the season. “It felt like it took forever to get to me. I was just thinking, ‘Catch the ball, catch the ball, catch the ball.’”
The score was Oregon’s first since early in the second quarter, when senior tailback Maurice Morris scored on a one-yard run to give the Ducks a 14-7 lead. After sitting out last week’s win against Arizona State, Morris finished Saturday with a game-high 129 yards on 14 carries for an average of 9.2 yards per rush.
Harrington got Oregon on the scoreboard in the first quarter on a gutsy, six-yard option run. After three Bruin defenders appeared to have Harrington wrapped up on the play, the senior quarterback somehow ducked under the tackle and dove into the end zone.
“Against an outstanding offensive football team, I thought we played well enough to win,” Toledo said.
In his first — and possibly final — playing appearance in the historic Rose Bowl, Harrington said it was an emotional win for him.
“It’s nice to end on a winning note here, even if it is the end of our chances here,” Harrington said. “It’s a great feeling to beat a quality team, in front of a national audience. We know we have some doubters, and a lot of people jumped off our bandwagon when we lost (to Stanford), but we’re just trying to show people we have the courage and the character to play.
“We’re still a top team.”
A top team that knows when to relax and when to play.