UW Football | Huskies aim to end drought against Bruins

Former Washington linebacker Ink Aleaga is reminded of the last time UW beat UCLA in the Rose Bowl and responds as would any die-hard Huskies fan.

"Man, it's been 12 years?" he exclaims. "Jeez."

Indeed, it has been that long since the Huskies beat UCLA in the Rose Bowl, a 38-14 victory on Nov. 11, 1995, a drought they will try to break Saturday when they play the Bruins at 7:15 p.m.

Aleaga, in his sixth year in the UW's athletic academic advising department, was a junior linebacker in 1995, making an interception early in the game that led to a touchdown.

The Huskies have lost all five games they've played against the Bruins since, their longest such streak in any Pac-10 venue (not including UW's win over Purdue in the 2001 Rose Bowl).

UW hasn't won one on the road against one of the Los Angeles schools since winning at USC in 1996.

They've lost their five games to the Bruins with four coaches, and by a combined 83 points, with margins both big (30) and small (three points in overtime).

"But I really don't think there's any rhyme or reason to it," said former UW quarterback Brock Huard, who started in the 1997 game that began Washington's streak of futility in Los Angeles, a 52-28 defeat. "I don't think there's anything mystical to it. I just think they've been pretty darn good."

That, of course, is the simplest explanation for it, especially the past two visits.

Still, the defeats have often bordered on the inexplicable.

In 1999, for instance, the Huskies were 6-3 and coming off a rousing win at Arizona when they went to Pasadena to take on a UCLA team that was 3-6 and had been outscored 95-14 the previous three weeks.

A UW win would have kept the Huskies in first place in the Pac-10.

Instead, a Bruins team forced to go with redshirt freshman quarterback Ryan McCann when Cory Paus was injured early in the game, held on to beat UW, 23-20 in overtime. The Huskies offense struggled, with Marques Tuiasosopo ailing with a sore backside.

That defeat still stings many of the players from that team as it essentially cost the Huskies — who won the conference the following year — from playing in back-to-back Rose Bowls.

"If you look back, in 1999 if we had beaten UCLA we would have gone to the Rose Bowl two straight years," Jafar Williams, a linebacker on those teams, said recently. "That's how I look at it now. We had a great team, but we only got one Rose Bowl out of it."

In 2001, a UW team that had won 12 in a row was blown out 35-13 with DeShaun Foster rushing for 301 yards, a school record (which was later broken in Seattle against UW by UCLA's Maurice Drew-Jones with 322).

The 2003 game was the last time the Huskies played as a ranked team, heading to Pasadena at No. 18. It looked for a half as if they'd stay there, leading 16-7. But UCLA then scored 39 unanswered points in the second half en route to a 46-16 win that many players pointed to as a turning point in the program's spiral. UW hasn't been in the Top 25 since.

In Washington's last trip in 2005, the Huskies had a shot at what loomed as a possible breakthrough win in Tyrone Willingham's first season, appearing to take a 24-14 lead with less than five minutes left on a 49-yard run by Louis Rankin. Instead, the play was called back by a holding call on guard Tusi Sa'au that the Huskies thought was non-existent, and UCLA rallied to win 21-17.

"That could have been disputed, at least from my chair," Willingham said this week. "That made a huge difference in the game."

So they'll head there again Saturday to take another shot at the Bruins, hoping for something like what happened in 1995. That year, the Huskies were fresh off a 24-22 home loss to Oregon that ended up costing UW a spot in the Rose Bowl.

"I knew coming after that Oregon game it was going to be a tough week," Aleaga remembers.

On UCLA's first play, linebacker Jerry Jensen burst through and blasted Bruins running back Karim Abdul-Jabbar — who had rushed for more than 200 yards in each of the previous three games — knocking him from the game.

"That set the tempo for everybody on defense," Aleaga said of a unit that forced five turnovers as UW busted out to a 38-7 lead in the third quarter.

History, though, is mostly lost on the current team.

"We don't buy into the hype or to the past," said cornerback Roy Lewis. "All we can do is look forward."

And maybe look out below, as well.

Bob Condotta: 206-515-5699 or bcondotta@seattletimes.com