UCLA Community Backs the Pac, Reacts to Oregon's Upset Over Ohio State
The Bruins' win over the Tigers was the biggest nonconference win in the Pac-12 for all of one week.
No. 12 Oregon (2-0) went on the road and upset No. 3 Ohio State (1-1) by a score of 35-28 Saturday afternoon. Just seven days earlier, UCLA (2-0) defended its home turf against then-No. 16 LSU (0-1) in a 38-27 victory.
The two wins have placed the Pac-12 squarely in the College Football Playoff discussion despite not having any teams in the preseason AP top 10. The Bruins are a major part of that conversation at the moment, with the conference very much up for grabs and tougher than most people expected.
Oregon led wire-to-wire against one of the most dominant programs in the country over the past decade, all in front of a hostile crowd of over 100,000.
One friendly face in Columbus was Pac-12 commissioner George Kliavkoff, who was watching from Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren's box before going down to field level to watch the Ducks put it away late.
The support flooded in from Oregon's Pac-12 foes back west as the game went final, starting at the top at UCLA and trickling down the roster as well.
The support for the Pac-12 spread to players' parents as well, including the always Twitter-active Melva Thompson-Robinson.
Media members and personalities from around the UCLA Twittersphere also joined in on the conversation, extrapolating the result of Oregon's win to the conference's image as a whole.
The Pac-12 hadn't beaten a ranked SEC team in over a decade before the Bruins checked that box, and the Ducks had never beaten the Buckeyes head-to-head. Things are different in 2021, and that could show in major ways when the College Football Playoff committee sits down to decide the four top teams in the country later this fall.
Next up on the slate for UCLA, ironically, is Fresno State, which gave Oregon a run for its money Week 1. The Bulldogs were hanging tight all day long and only managed to get outdone by a last-minute touchdown run by the Ducks' quarterback Anthony Brown.
The Bruins' next opponent saw their stock rise even higher just because of a game that happened 2,000 miles away in Ohio.
Coming off a bye, UCLA has a chance to add even more context to the Pac-12's early season success when it kicks things off against Fresno State on Sept. 18.
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