Back from the dead, UCLA and Florida revel in their resuscitation

The dead, who typically turn up in droves only around the end of October, just had themselves a heyday near the beginning. They emerged in the East from a famous swamp – sorry, Swamp. They materialized in the West from a dead arroyo. They took a loco college football season and sent it further up the path toward haywire. They said exhilarated things and smiled such thorough smiles that it seemed almost worthwhile to have spent September trampled and dismissed from the national mindset. Who wouldn’t want to go 1-3 or 0-4 and then resuscitate?

In the first season since 1964 that the preseason top-two teams have each lost twice this soon – Mississippi and Oklahoma back then, Texas and Penn State right now – the teams that beat Texas and Penn State on Saturday, Florida and UCLA, had combined to beat just one team before Saturday: the Long Island University Sharks. Florida (1-3) seemed pretty dead. UCLA (0-4) seemed surely deader if not the very deadest.

The Bruins had lost their first three games by 108-43, had taken a 35-10 insult at home from New Mexico, had jettisoned their second-year coach Sept. 14, had jettisoned their defensive coordinator Sept. 17 and had jettisoned their offensive coordinator just last Tuesday. Their crowds had thinned from thin to thinner. In a sports culture that simply must evaluate every granular detail of sports prematurely, the loud springtime transfer of quarterback Nico Iamaleava from Tennessee to UCLA already had qualified as an inescapable bust.

“Nobody in the world expected us to win – let’s be honest here,” defensive back Key Lawrence would say, and defensive lineman Gary Smith III spoke of “outsiders … losing belief in us” before adding “and reasonably so.” Well, somehow Iamaleava had kept attending practice, and by the time of his five touchdowns – three by foot, two by air – and his 128 rushing yards and a 42-37 whopper upset, UCLA made it look like the most thrilling thing in life to go from 0-4 to 1-4. Its postgame news conference alone could cure the blues.

First came a 47-year-old man anonymous to most, an interim head coach, but the thing about Tim Skipper is that once you start listening to him, you might want your children, grandchildren and further generations to play for him. He has assistant-coached from Fresno State to Florida to Central Michigan and back, plus other places, and he has interim-head-coached already at Fresno State, where he used to play linebacker. With his charisma and his brio and his words that spill out of him with uncommon rapidity, he told reporters at the Rose Bowl: “College football is crazy in many, multiple ways. You just take whatever happens each day and you just keep on striving to stay on the rise. That’s basically what it is. I’m a passionate, emotional, energetic type of guy, and that’s what I bring every single day. You never have a bad day unless you declare it a bad day.”

He concluded: “There were many storms happening throughout the last two weeks, but we found the daylight. We found the sunshine.”

It’s considered a storm in football circles, for example, to say farewell to an offensive coordinator on the Tuesday before a game against the No. 7 team in the country and to have an interim head coach refer to the parting as “mutual.” That’s what happened at UCLA until UCLA handed the play-calling to a guy who’s 33 but looks barely more than half of that. That’s how Jerry Neuheisel, former UCLA quarterback, son of a former UCLA quarterback and head coach, came to ride off into the sunshine on his players’ shoulders, came to an interview room, beamed and told reporters, “The first thing I want to say is I love UCLA more than anything.”

He recounted a week most would consider suboptimal: “Tuesday at 5 o’clock, I found out that I was going to be calling plays and then hadn’t slept until about – I got, like, three hours of sleep since then. Just trying to put together something that I think that they could operate on, and they could go execute and something they could be confident with. And I put a lot of onus on (Iamaleava).” By Friday night, though, Neuheisel detected “the most enthusiastic 0-4 team you’d ever seen in your life,” a team rich in “this delusional optimism where you’re like, ‘We might have a chance at this thing.’ ” Then they began coaching and playing, and then came still more enchanting details.

“I hate to say this,” said Neuheisel, a tight ends coach at the season’s outset, “but I had never practiced with the headset in terms of, like, the button to talk to the quarterback. So there’s multiple times during the game I’m calling a play, but the headset’s flipped up because I’m used to being a position coach. And then all of a sudden I’m pressing the wrong part of the button, trying to talk to him.”

“A couple times,” Iamaleava said, “I just had to call my own play, man, because Jerry would forget to push the button.”

After all of that, and after defensive back Scooter Jackson’s brilliant stuffing of fourth and two from the UCLA 9-yard line, they all went to one of the greatest 1-4 locker rooms in history, apparently. “Uh, disaster,” Skipper said when asked to describe it. “There’s water flying everywhere. There’s music. There’s guys that can’t dance that are dancing. There’s coaches trying to be dancers. It was exciting to be in there.” After some Saturdays that Skipper called “kind of lonely and sad,” here came one where “you’d think it’s Mardi Gras or something happening.”

That’s the timeless value of a hopeless 0-4.

Barely had that Mardi Gras concluded when another locker room of wide smiles pulsated back east as an allegedly bygone Billy Napier, less bygone than before, spoke with reporters in Gainesville. His Florida Gators had beaten Long Island in the first week, yes, but then had run the early part of their impossible schedule to an irrelevance over which people did grouse. After they looked every bit a national contender while beating No. 9 Texas, 29-21, Napier made this thoughtful, uplifting statement: “And, man, you’ve got to give these kids some credit. I think nowadays in college athletics (with all the transfers), maybe there’s a little bit of a black eye about the sport, what it can teach, what locker rooms are like, and I can only speak for ourselves. I’m not giving up on ‘team.’ That’s a football team. And I’m humbled to be a part of it.”

Soon after quarterback DJ Lagway had praised “camaraderie,” an offensive line that “means the world to me” and a certain herculean receiver who played his first game after injury with six catches for 111 yards and a monster 55-yard touchdown romp up the sideline, that receiver, Dallas Wilson, came in. He would tell reporters of that touchdown: “Corner had fallen to the floor. Lag had thrown the ball up to me. Caught it, and after that I just let my talent take over, really.”

But before all that, he began by walking up and saying: “How y’all doing? How y’all doing? It’s my first time doing this” – meaning a news conference – and he smiled the kind of irresistible smile that made it seem enviable to go from 1-3 to 2-3 or to rise from the dead.