The Bruins will start their conference slate with a chance at redemption.
No. 24 UCLA football (2-1) will take on its first Pac-12 opponent of the season when it travels north for a contest against Stanford (2-1) on Saturday. The Bruins last faced the Cardinal in their 2020 season finale, falling 48-47 in double overtime at the Rose Bowl and handing coach Chip Kelly his third straight losing season in Westwood.
Redshirt senior defensive back Obi Eboh – who transferred to UCLA in 2020 after four years with Stanford – said after practice Tuesday that the team is familiar with their opponent.
“We’re going against a physical team, a team with a good coaching staff, a team that’s familiar with us and how we’ve been playing the last few years,” Eboh said. “They’re very well-coached and disciplined and all those kinds of things so we’re expecting a tough game.”
UCLA is coming off a 40-37 loss to Fresno State at the Rose Bowl following two home wins to open the season, making the contest against Stanford its first road trip of the season.
Kelly said before Monday’s practice that creating an atmosphere similar to the one at Stanford Stadium will help the team prepare for its time in Northern California.
“We always use music to just simulate crowd noise so you can communicate where you are,” Kelly said. “We were up at Stanford two years ago. They came here last year, so we understand that environment a little bit.”
While the contest will be UCLA’s first game of 2021 away from the Rose Bowl, it will also mark Stanford’s first home game of the campaign, as the Cardinal opened their season with three nonconference games on the road. After a 24-7 defeat at the hands of No. 25 Kansas State to start the season, Stanford picked up wins against USC and Vanderbilt.
The Bruins hold a slim 45-43-3 all-time advantage over the Cardinal but a 24-20-2 deficit in games in Stanford. In its last contest against Stanford, redshirt senior running back Brittain Brown ran for 219 yards in the loss as part of a season-high 291-yard rushing effort from UCLA.
Brown said focusing on physicality and the running game will be a key part of the team’s approach against the Cardinal.
“(I’m) just glad to win the physicality match,” Brown said. “Stanford is a physical team. … Running the ball downhill is going to be good for us.”
In their first two wins of the season, UCLA ran for 244 yards against Hawai’i and 210 against LSU. Against the Bulldogs, however, the Bruins rushed for nearly half those marks, earning only 117 yards on the ground.
“The mindset that we wanted to have coming back in for this week is just run hard, run the plays right over and over again until we get it down pat,” Brown said. “(We want to) just keep on rolling, so we can roll into another win.”
After a schedule that included only conference games a year ago, the matchup will mark the first Pac-12 action for the Bruins in 2021. The blue and gold have not seen a winning record in conference play since 2015.
Before the start of the 2021 campaign, the preseason Pac-12 media poll chose the Bruins to rank fourth in the Pac-12 South, while the Cardinal earned the fourth spot in the Pac-12 North.
Senior defensive back Stephan Blaylock said starting the conference schedule will serve as a restart for the Bruins following their final matchup of the nonconference slate.
“This is a new start for us,” Blaylock said. “That was preseason nonconference games. Now we feel like we could start over just going into the Pac-12. We’re 0-0 in conference looking to go 1-0.”
Kickoff between UCLA and Stanford is set for 3 p.m. at Stanford Stadium.
