Offensive play-calling duties were given to Jerry Neuheisel, a 33-year-old former player with no prior experience.
The win featured a career game from quarterback Nico Iamaleava, who transferred from Tennessee.
Jerry’s father, former UCLA coach and player Rick Neuheisel, emotionally watched his son’s success while working as a CBS analyst.
Let’s begin with the aftermath of UCLA’s stunning upset of Penn State, because in this new insular college football world of get yours, Jerry Neuheisel allowed us all to take a deep breath and just be.
“First thing I want to say is I love UCLA more than anything,” Neuheisel said.
And somewhere in New York City, a dad heard his son and cried again.
For his son, for his university, for all of college football.
“Sometimes we forget how beautiful this game is,” Rick Neuheisel says.
How else can you explain UCLA interim coach Tim Skipper, asked to do the impossible in the middle of a disastrous season, deciding to give offensive play calling duties to 33-year-old Jerry Neuheisel, a former UCLA player who had never done it before? Officially, anyway.
Because Jerry and Rick Neuheisel saw this coming decades ago, when Rick — while working a coaching career that would take him from college football to the NFL and back to college football and his alma mater, UCLA — would sit on the couch with his young son and watch games.
Why did they call that play? What play would you call next? How are you going to set up that next play call? Don’t forget those puncture play calls.
So Jerry wasn’t exactly heading into the belly of the beast without a sword, he just hadn’t swung it. But as the college football gods so often do for us, this story had a twist.
UCLA was the benefactor this offseason of the poster child for player greed: talented but enigmatic quarterback Nico Iamaleava.
The same Iamaleava that wanted more NIL money from Tennessee, and held out at just the right time — the Friday before the opening of the spring transfer portal the following Monday — in a meticulously-planned effort to gain negotiating leverage. And then it backfired.
Tennessee moved on, Iamaleava took a paycut and moved to UCLA, and suddenly became the tip of the spear for all that’s wrong with the player empowerment era of college football. He was Contagion 1.
And somehow, these two ends of the college football spectrum — one who loves his university more than anything, and one looking for the next payout — found each other in a magical moment.
It’s just a sweet symphony, isn’t it?
Meanwhile, back in New York City, Rick Neuheisel was doing what he always does on fall Saturdays as an analyst for CBS’ Big Ten coverage. His producer, Craig Silver, one of the great minds of the modern era of college football television, thought it would be cool to have Neuheisel break down a UCLA drive with Jerry calling plays.
Live, while it happened.
The next thing you know, UCLA peels off a 17-play, 75-yard drive in just over eight minutes. The damn thing had everything: an 11-yard run in a 3rd-and-10 pass situation, a sack, Iamaleava recovering his own fumble, and three plays from the Penn State-5 to finally cap the drive with a touchdown pass — a beautifully designed option route where wide receiver Titus Mokiao-Atimalals initially stumbled during the break, and then recovered to complete the score.
Piece of cake.
Rick Neuheisel, his eyes welling, screamed with joy. For his son, for his university.
The same university where he walked on in the early 1980s as a skinny quarterback from Tempe, Ariz., and eventually led the Bruins to a 45-9 rout of Illinois in the 1984 Rose Bowl. He threw for 298 yards and four touchdowns in that game, and he swears it doesn’t even compare to what Jerry did last weekend on the same field.
It wasn’t until the final seconds ticked away, until UCLA had pulled the unthinkable with some sharp play calling from Jerry, a career game from Iamaleava and a whole lot of guts from Skipper to set it in motion, that both Jerry and Rick could exhale.
UCLA players lifted Jerry on their shoulders and carried him off the Rose Bowl turf, the Mecca of college football where the ghosts of the San Gabriel mountains had witnessed so much over so many years.
CBS, meanwhile, had a shot locked in on Rick in the studio, the wells in his eyes now weeping with pride, joy, and yes, a W for UCLA.
“How can you not love college football when you have days like this?” Jerry said afterward.
More than 30 years ago, Rick went to go see his friend and UCLA alum Troy Aikman in an NFL playoff game. Aikman’s Dallas Cowboys beat the Green Bay Packers, and Rick met up with Aikman later that night at Aikman’s house.
Rick walked in the door, and Aikman handed him a bottle of Dom Perignon. Rick asked for glasses.
“You don’t need glasses,” Aikman said in his thick Henryetta, Okla., accent. “Knock a horn off that thing.”
Not long after UCLA’s win over Penn State last weekend, after Jerry had explained how UCLA pulled off the unthinkable and that it was now moving on to Michigan State (because that’s what coaches do), Rick called his wife, Susan, to see how the celebration was unfolding.
They celebrate all wins in the Neuheisel family because, son of a gun, every win in football is so dang hard and never gets old. And never without a bottle of Dom Perignon.
When Rick was coaching at UCLA from 2008-2011, they’d sit in the Rose Bowl parking lot after the game and celebrate with just about anyone who walked by. Last weekend, Rick’s son Jack, and wife, Susan, went to the game, but didn’t tell anyone what they were hiding.
The bottle of Dom was in the trunk, waiting for the big win.
“What are you doing?” Rick asked Susan when he called.
“Knocking a horn off,’ she said.
Piece of cake.
Matt Hayes is the senior national college football writer for USA TODAY Sports Network. Follow him on X at @MattHayesCFB.