PASADENA, Calif. — For most of this season, when UCLA’s defensive front drew a line in the sand, it may as well have been on Santa Monica Beach. Wave after wave of running backs poured over the Bruins, even giving downtrodden teams like Colorado some hope.
But in a four-year span in which the Buffaloes play every road game like they’re lost at sea, their running attack trickled into a little puddle in the middle of the Rose Bowl.
Colorado rushed for only 87 yards Saturday against the worst run defense in the Pac-12, one of the many factors in the Bruins’ easy 45-6 rout.
“Coach always emphasizes we’ve got to stop beating ourselves,” sophomore tackle David Bakhtiari said. “Once we do that, we start beating our opponent. We’ve just got to do the little things that are holding us back.”
Considering that first-year Colorado coach Jon Embree wants to make a power running game the foundation of his program, rushing for only 87 yards isn’t a little thing.
UCLA had given up a whopping 190.2 rushing yards a game. That’s 95th in the country, squeezed between the inauspicious company of Memphis and Alabama-Birmingham. Yet the Bruins played like a turquoise curtain against Colorado.
At halftime, Colorado had 19 yards on 15 carries. Through three quarters it had 40 yards, 39 from Rodney Stewart, the school’s second all-time leading rusher who finished with the quietest 77 of his career.
“They had a higher sense of urgency,” said Stewart, echoing the night’s theme. “We had a lack of energy. We have to play hard. We’re not good enough to just show up.”
Granted, the Bruins (6-5, 5-3 Pac-12) had more on the line. The win made them bowl-eligible, secured the inside rail on the South Division crown and saved embattled coach Rick Neuheisel’s job for another day.
But the Buffaloes (2-10, 1-7) extended their out-of-state losing streak to 24 games, dating back to 2007. With the Rose Bowl just over half-filled, Colorado felt it could control the clock on the ground and remind UCLA’s defense of its awful season.
It didn’t happen. The Bruins rarely blitzed and still held the line. Oregon State, with 88 rushing yards, was the only other UCLA opponent that had fewer than 134.
“We couldn’t sustain nothing,” Embree said. “We couldn’t get first downs. We have to get first downs and stay on the field to give ourselves a chance.”
With his rocky inaugural campaign ending Friday at Utah, Embree’s power running foundation is still missing a few nuts and bolts. Stewart has climbed the career charts, but Colorado has had seven worse rushing games than this one. It entered Saturday 104th out of 120 FBS teams nationally at 110.6 yards a game.
And next year, gone will be Stewart and starting guards Ethan Adkins and Ryan Miller.
“We’re not very consistent but part of a foundation has been built as far as knowledge of the guys,” Embree said. “We’ll evaluate everything at the end of the season. I’m sure there will be things on both sides of the ball that we’ll tweak.”
John Henderson: 303-954-1299, jhenderson@denverpost.com or,
