LOS ANGELES — Tim Skipper walked into Drake Stadium a month ago and attempted to right a ship that had already metaphorically crashed and sunk.
As he shook each of the media corps’ hands before his first time speaking to reporters as the Bruins’ interim head coach, Skipper represented a fresh face trying to ease UCLA through the rest of the already-downtrodden season.
On Tuesday, exactly one month since he became UCLA’s interim head coach, Skipper may be a household name among college football-loving fans across the nation. The Bruins’ meteoric rise from trending to an eventual upset against then-No. 7 Penn State, to the Big Ten team that their foes would least like to face, has led Skipper on a whirlwind four weeks.
Credit has been thrown toward Jerry Neuheisel, the boy who grew up a Bruin, played as a quarterback in Westwood and awaited his chance to call plays at the Rose Bowl for close to a decade before finally receiving the headset two weeks ago.
Eighty points in two games, for a team that failed to score in the first quarter through four games, is some accomplishment.
It made sense – the story was too good to pass up, for the likes of ESPN’s Pat McAfee or Barstool, havens for hot takes. But Skipper, who tries to stay off social media, said that who gets the attention doesn’t matter to him – the winning is what counts.
“I don’t really know what’s happening in the outside world [because] I’m in this building so much,” Skipper said Monday. “I’m just working and I just try to put us in the best position to be successful on Saturday. … I just control the controllables; I don’t know what the narrative is and all that stuff, I’m just doing what I do.”
For Keanu Williams, the redshirt senior defensive lineman who has known Skipper since he was 11 years old, attending camps at his hometown college, Fresno State, he said the team has fed off of the energy Skipper brings to campus every day.
The messaging Skipper has preached across his career is now bleeding into the vernacular of his players. Williams waxed poetic over breathing the same air as their foes, a soundbite Skipper has shared in interviews and behind closed doors. Any opponent is someone UCLA can take on under Skipper, Williams said.
What’s impressed Williams about his newfound leader in blue and gold?
“[Skipper took] over such a hardship,” Williams said. “He just came up and just really ignored that noise, you know, and then he just did it for us, and then now we’re just paying it back to him and doing it for him, too.”
Notes
The storm system that swept through Los Angeles on Tuesday morning and afternoon waterlogged the newly renovated Spaulding Field’s 100-yard grass field, forcing UCLA to practice on the intramural fields. …
A source familiar with the Spaulding Field renovation said drainage issues are fairly common for new fields and that the grass needs time to adjust to levels of rainfall, such as the weather event Tuesday. …
Running back Anthony Woods – who left Saturday’s victory at Michigan State after a below-the-belt hit – did not practice during the media-watching period Tuesday. ….
Skipper said Monday that between Woods and fellow tailback Anthony Frias II, who also left Saturday’s game with an undisclosed ailment, Woods came out of the game with a more substantial situation.