Alexander: It’s a long, hard road back for UCLA football

PASADENA – Do you get the sense that there are times when UCLA’s athletic administrators ask each other, “What on earth did we get ourselves into?”

Maybe that moment actually arrived Saturday night at the Rose Bowl.

Rebuilds are hard. Rebuilds when embarking on a transition to another, seemingly more rugged conference, can be excruciating. And UCLA football is not only in a rebuild, but it may have to hit bottom before starting upward.

Let’s see: The Bruins began the DeShaun Foster era by barely beating Hawaii, getting routed by new conference foe Indiana – which is, incidentally, now 5-0 and shares the Big Ten lead with Michigan at 2-0 –and incurring one of those valiant, gutty lil’ Bruin-type losses at Louisiana State, against a team that’s now 4-1 and ranked 14th.

Saturday night they faced No. 8 Oregon, an old/new conference foe, and the Bruins’ first Big Ten After Dark experience went pretty much as expected. The Ducks were favored over UCLA by 25½, had a 28-3 lead with 2:25 before halftime and cruised from there to a methodical 34-13 victory. Big Ten, Pac-12, what’s the difference?

Worse, the fans voted with their feet Saturday night. Large numbers of fans had lost interest in UCLA football under Chip Kelly, and the program had enjoyed an early resurgence of interest under Foster. But the huge tarps still cover six large sections of seats at each end of the Rose Bowl. Saturday night’s attendance was announced as 43,051, and most of the uncovered seats were at least full at the beginning of the night.

But by the time the second half began more than half of those seats had been vacated. The new student seats, the standing safe sections located behind the visitor’s bench that were supposed to provide the Bruins a home field edge, were full at the start – for the first home game since classes resumed – but largely empty by the fourth quarter.

And how many of those fans walked away muttering “Same old Bruins?”

Quarterback Ethan Garbers threw for only 118 yards, had two interceptions and four sacks, and came out with a little more than nine minutes to play after taking a hard hit and sitting up holding the back of his head.

“I saw him in the locker room after the game, and I told him that as the leader of the offensive line, we need to figure this out,” guard Josh Carlin said. “We need to keep him up. We failed on that, miserably. And we got to start taking pride and not let him get hurt and not let him get touched so he can operate this offense … We just need to continue to get better and, figure out, as soon as possible what we need to do to protect Garbs.”

While the Bruins offensive line couldn’t protect its quarterback, the Bruins’ defense couldn’t get to the other guys’ quarterback. Dillon Gabriel, the latest Ducks’ transfer quarterback – or, if you will, hired gun – threw for 280 yards and three touchdowns, including a 52-yard scoring strike to Taz Johnson to make it 25-3 in the second quarter.

Oregon outgained UCLA 433-172, and that’s a pretty accurate picture of the evening.

Will it get better? Not for a while. Next week UCLA (1-3, 0-2 in conference) plays at No. 9 Penn State (4-0, 1-0) in State College, Pa. The week after, Minnesota (2-3, 0-2) comes to the Rose Bowl, and that could be the Bruins’ best shot at a victory the rest of the way. From there, they play at Rutgers (4-0, 1-0), at Nebraska (4-1, 1-1), at home against Iowa (3-1, 1-0), at Washington (3-2, 1-1), and then No. 13 USC (3-1, 1-1) and Fresno State (3-2, 1-1) in the Rose Bowl. By the time the Bulldogs from the Mountain West (and soon the reconstituted Pac-12) get to Pasadena, these Bruins may be throughly beaten down.

Just imagine if they’d had Michigan or Ohio State on their initial Big Ten schedule.

Right now Foster’s biggest chore may be to keep his players believing that times will get better. The most dynamic Bruins plays of the night were one that counted and one that didn’t. Bryan Addison returned an interception 94 yards for a touchdown right before halftime to cut Oregon’s lead to 28-10, while Oluwafemi Oladejo’s 72-yard runback of a fumble recovery early in the fourth quarter was wiped out when Kain Medrano was penalized for a horse collar tackle.

Three plays later, Gabriel threw his third touchdown pass of the night, and his second to Johnson.

“We’re gonna learn from these losses,” Foster said. “I know I see it. I know y’all see it. Some of you choose not to, but they’re improving. We’re just going to continue to improve, and to work hard … I mean, they should be down. Nobody should be excited about what happened. The fact that they’re still out there playing, when (the score’s) a little bit lopsided and they’re still out there playing hard, that just shows their character. We got some good dudes.

“Eventually this is gonna turn around.”

But it’s going to take a while.

jalexander@scng.com