UCLA

“I see dead people … Walking around like regular people … They don't even know they're dead … They're everywhere.” Zombies prowl now. As if college football ...

Players “understand that how you train during the week is how you play on Saturday,” Kelly said on Saturday, listeners staying awake through that and other passages. Thompson-Robinson, in a fifth UCLA season, would be the nation’s sixth-highest-rated passer (with Hooker seventh), and he would be the guy who just said to reporters, “We all know the history between UCLA and Utah … For another, UCLA hasn’t turned up in a Rose Bowl since just months before “The Sixth Sense” release date, becoming reputed maybe even for the un-American act of prioritizing academics. And that’s despite the impossible fact that the other Mike, now an analyst at Georgia, has five children, one named Jake. UCLA tore through defending Pac-12 champion Utah 42-32 in the Rose Bowl on Saturday and shone fresh light on the established talents of another quarterback long familiar but finding fresh heights: Dorian Thompson-Robinson. For one thing, UCLA had spent the past 16 seasons going 99-99, a startling achievement of mathematics if not necessarily football. Yet now the batty landscape brims with Tennessee Orange but also UCLA Blue, a hue of blue long since also among the prettiest things anyone ever saw. “They’re on the same page,” Heupel said of his team. Tennessee had come to define forgettable in its 85-88 run across the past 14 seasons of five head coaches who arrived and thudded, arrived and thudded. How funky that it would end up being that quarterback, Josh Heupel, the son of a high school principal and a football coach at Northern State University in Aberdeen, S.D., who by 2022 would yank Tennessee out of a crypt of which it had pretty much paid off its mortgage. Well, five years further into the muck, they’ve up and beaten Florida 38-33 in Knoxville on Sept. That references Neyland Stadium, that storied old hulk by the Tennessee River which America might have forgotten it had in its midst.