Ok, we promised you a Stat of the Week for today's game and we finally have come up with one.   We are pretty much 3 for 3 this year in picking the stat of the week that is key to each game's outcome (Stanford, BYU, Utah).   Last week, all the stats and data pointed to complete domination by our Bruins in every facet of the game, including the final score - though the Vegas spread was tight (UCLA favored by 14.4 to 16.5) as far as we were concerned.  We thought the spread was key to the outcome of the game, and that it would be a blow-out, so we made the spread the key stat of the week.   We were right, the spread was the key to the game with Utah pulling away and UCLA players quitting on Dorrell once Utah did pull away.  We just chose the wrong team to do that and win.

This reason why it was hard to find this week's Stat of the Week is the fact that we didn't know which team Karl Dorrell was going to get to show up, and what game plan, if any, were he and his on-the-job-training coordinators going to come up with.   No amount of analysis would help us to predict the renown inconsistency of Dorrell's teams.   But we came up with our answer during The Bruin Show and only now realized that we did.  For those of you who listened to The Bruin Show live online radio program on this past Wednesday night, that included a DumpDorrell editor as a panelist (you can still listen to the podcast any time), there was a segment towards the end of the show where panelists were asked to predict the outcome of the game. The obvious answer was that it wasn't possible, that it would depend entirely on what team comes out in the first half. 

And therein lies the key Stat of the Week:  if the Bruins keep it close in the first half we will win this game.  That's it in a nutshell.  If we let this game get away from us in the first quarter or first half we will lose.  The team will lose the crowd (remember boos rained down from the seats at the RB last year), the team will lose what's left of a somewhat shaken confidence and Dorrell will lose control of the team.  In the locker room, Dorrell simply doesn't command the absolute respect of the team as we have already seen many times, and finger pointing and a lack of trust will quickly kill their spirit and determination coming out of the half. 

If we are not close at half time, the team will have quit on Dorrell and he will not be able to bring them back.  For all our efforts to dump Dorrell, we would hate to see that.  The players deserve better … the fans deserve better.  This is not how we would want to see Dorrell go or the players experience their season.   If we must lose, we would much much rather see the team work and play hard, never giving up, knowing that they gave it their best shot.  We would still want Dorrell gone, but at least we could say, and the players themselves could know, the team did not quit (something they have done now many times).

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