To Live and Die in L.A. was a stylish action thriller made for the Miami Vice/MTV generation by director William Friedkin in 1985. It starred a hopelessly young William Petersen opposed by a scene-chewing unknown named Willem Dafoe, who would get his big break a year later with the release of Platoon.
It doesn't have much to do with football, except that like the Secret Service agents in the movie the Ducks cover is already blown. As a team saddled with a green rookie agent (their inexperienced freshman quarterback Braxton Burmeister) it's too easy for the bad guys to sniff out what they're trying to do.
Oregon's only chance to win Saturday is to bust into Rosen's crib and make him panic and burn a bunch of his fake cash.
UCLA has the conference's worst run defense. Just 3-3 on the season, they gave up 457 yards to Arizona on the ground last week, allowing four rushing touchdowns in a 47-30 loss. The Wildcats new quarterback, sophomore Kahlil Tate, burned them for 230 yards on 15 carries, including a scintillating 71-yard touchdown run.
Tate's the real deal, and the Ducks will have to deal with him in a couple of weeks. In a September game he had 357 yards rushing versus the Colorado Buffaloes. He's like Jeremiah Masoli unencumbered by a stolen laptop, the kind of tricky/shifty/elusive dual threat QB Rich Rodriguez used to have at West Virginia. Tate's single-handedly transformed Arizona from a conference also-ran PAC-12 teams could pencil in for homecoming to a pesky opponent that's a headache to prepare for.
Significantly, in UA's pasting of UCLA they attempted just 13 passes, completing 9 for 148 yards.
Somehow Oregon has to find that much of a passing attack. Burmeister is no Kahlil Tate at this stage of his career, but he has the conference's best running back stable to his left in the Gulf Coast Offense. In the blowout loss to Stanford last Saturday the Ducks ran for 286 yards even when The Cardinal had the advantage of knowing what they could and couldn't do do on every play.
The Bruins don't have Stanford's toughness. They've allowed a league-worst 326 yards a game on the ground, 6.57 yards per carry. The Ducks offensive line should smell blood in the dumpster.
Oregon can score enough points to win this weekend if Burmeister takes just a couple of steps forward in his development as the green rookie quarterback. Like everyone else in Oregon's agonizing Herbertless odyssey through the meat of their schedule the Bruins will pack the box and dare him to throw, pressure him with run blitzes and shifts he doesn't have the experience to recognize.
He's achieving a childhood dream as a San Diego native returning to Southern California to play a game in the Rose Bowl. Maybe that's enough to get him to calm down and trust his talent (he has some). Maybe his teammates will do a better job of picking him up, protecting him, executing for him and avoiding costly penalties on big plays. Because there are big plays to be had against a woeful Jim Mora/Tom Bradley defense.
On the Oregon sideline Duck defensive coordinator Jim Leavitt has to bring out the ravenous Doberman in his defense. They've got to attack. attack, attack and rattle Rosen's rich-boy facade of self-assurance.
Joshua Ballinger Lippincott Rosen is the son of a prominent orthopedic surgeon and a former journalist. Mensa smart and profoundly gifted, he comes by his talent naturally: his father was a nationally-ranked figure skater who nearly made it to the Olympics, his mother a former captain of the Princeton lacrosse team. J.B.L. Rosen was an age-group tennis champion growing up, giving it up for football just as he entered high school.
Rosen went to St. John Bosco prep school and grew up in an $8 million house in Manhattan Beach, California. He's notorious for questioning authority to the point of arrogance, supremely confident, impossibly driven. Trent Dilfer hates him: Rosen wouldn't listen at Elite 11 Camp back in 2014. He thought he knew more than the instructors.
The famously opinionated ESPN analyst told Chad Carson of 247Sports:
“He looks what people think a quarterback should look like,” Dilfer said. “He’s big, he’s strong, he makes the very difficult look easy. He’s super, super smart, but I think it is almost a curse for him. Josh is a guy who has yet to buy in to what I am preaching. He’s still a guy who keeps telling me how they do it at John Bosco.
“It’s funny because I’ve sat him down, I’ve complimented him on how much he knows. He definitely understands defenses, but what Josh has to learn before the takes the keys over to a major college program is that it’s not about knowing more than the coach, it’s about doing it the coach’s way. And that’s something hopefully we’ll see in the next few days because he has one of our best coaches in (former NFL QB) Charlie Frye coaching him and if he was wise he would listen to what Charlie tells him.”
Three years forward, Rosen has the same triple curses of talent, intelligence and supreme self-confidence. He does amazing things on the football field, zipping passes between three defenders, leading a 34-point fourth quarter comeback versus Texas A&M.
He can be had, though. He can be frustrated. Through 6 games he's thrown 17 touchdowns with 10 interceptions. The Bruins have given up 14 sacks.
The Bruins don't have much of a running game. Leading rusher Soso Jamabo has only been so-so, with 249 yards on 49 carries.
If the Ducks can make their hosts one dimensional and pressure Chosen Rosen into some mistakes, they can steal a game at the Granddaddy. They are one-touchdown underdogs. It will require some fight and reversal of fortune. But honestly, this is their best chance to steal a win before the Civil War.
5-3 is dramatically better than a three game losing streak and 4-4. This is where the Oregon season turns, where Duck fans find out what they have in this new coaching staff and their ability to adjust on the fly and solve problems. They have to be the undercover cops and come in guns blazing in an impossible situation.
Nice Dale. I guess we'll just have to see which Rosenose shows up on Saturday. Hopefully it's the under 25 QBR of this past week vs Arizona.
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