No. 21.
Look at it once.
And do not talk or worry about it again.
That is what UCLA coach Bob Chesney told his team when he showed them their Associated Press Top 25 ranking during Sunday’s team meeting, reminding the Bruins what their priorities are as they come off their bye week and prepare for a showdown in Eugene, Ore., against the No. 13 Ducks.
“If you pay attention to this number it will go away,” Chesney said. “If you pay attention to what you did to get that number, and only focus on that and improve that, maybe the number even gets better. Who knows as time goes on, but that can’t be anything we talk about or worry about, and that’s why I wanted to bring it up one time and that was the end of it.”
The commitment to the process remains Chesney’s top priority as his team stares down its biggest test of the season to date.
While UCLA has the opportunity to leave Autzen Stadium victorious for the first time since 2004 and add legitimate steam to the Chesney Train, the coach said that the Bruins’ collective mentality has to be identical to the one they started preseason camp with eight weeks ago.
Chesney said he thought his team needed the bye week physically, but mentally, nobody wanted time off and all are hungry to improve.
Senior defensive back Derrick Barksdale said nothing about the context of the West Coast showdown affects the Bruins’ weekly game preparation.
“Being ranked can definitely skew your image of how you look at it, but if you look at it too long, just like Coach Chesney said, it can disappear very fast,” said Barksdale, who played for Chesney on a nationally ranked James Madison team last season. “It can disappear just as fast as it went up there, so I feel like you can’t pay too much attention to it. You have to go into the preparation of each week, just like you did in the past.”
Barksdale said James Madison’s loss to the Ducks in the College Football Playoff — during which the Dukes fell 51-34 in Eugene — adds no extra weight to the affair, emphasizing that the game is just another opportunity for the Bruins to take a step forward.
Chesney said he used the first-round playoff loss as a teaching point throughout the bye week.
“We can take away that there are no weaknesses in this team and if you leave them something to expose, they will expose it,” Chesney said of Oregon. “Whether it be technique that you put on film from your offensive linemen, as far as their defense attacking it, or your secondary, or your receivers or whatever you’re giving away. At some point that’s what the bye week was about — us really finding a way to cure a lot of those things, find our tendencies, put ourselves in position to use those in a positive way.”
The Bruins also used the bye week to prepare for the atmosphere in Eugene, where a sold-out crowd is expected to welcome the Bruins to Autzen Stadium for the first time since 2022.
While the JMU transfers got a taste of a night game in Oregon in December, the Bruins are deploying tactics to simulate the confines of “The Zoo” for the rest of the Bruins.
“We’re working on silent cadences,” fifth-year offensive lineman Hall Schmidt said. “Yesterday we had a speaker in the huddle, which was very helpful. They kind of just run up, put the speaker right behind Nico [Iamaleava] and turn it up all the way, and he has to yell the play to us and then the speaker will kind of drift a little closer towards the line of scrimmage and then back out as soon as we stand.”
With sidelines tight to the stands and steep seating that makes fans and the noise feel like they are on top of players, there’s little margin for error.
After defeating Maryland 54-3 before the bye week, Chesney emphasized the Bruins are at their best when they play complementary football, with all three phases of the game building on each other.
And complementary football may never be as imperative as it will be Saturday, when the Bruins will have to execute through the noise.
“They don’t have weak spots, so you can’t go out there and lay an egg on offense and expect to win this game or defense or special teams,” Chesney said. “You have to be buttoned up, and we have to make sure that we are 100% locked in on what our jobs are and what the intent of every single play is and how we’re going to execute it and then deal also with the noise and how do we handle that on short down and distances, in the red zone, backed up, all those moments where that stadium noise comes into play.”
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