I caught up with UCLA athletic director Dan Guerrero briefly in the locker room. Had a quick conversation:

Will there be a press conference in the next week…
“No. No, not at all. I don’t know why anyone would think that we would pull the trigger like that. My philosophy on early terminations may be different then some. That’s not to say I disrespect anyone else that makes a decision they have to make. Every situation is a little bit different. In our case, we have a coach who is working hard, assistant coaches who are working hard, kids are doing their best. Obviously we didn’t have the outcome we wanted to day. We got thumped pretty good. We knew we were coming into a stadium that was intense, knew their team was gong to be motivated. We needed to come in and match that and we didn’t do it today. We get a shot next week. I want to see us come out this week and practice hard and have a great game against Cal. I have a lot of respect for the coaching profession, and obviously Rick is a great Bruin. I brought him in here to turn this program around, and obviously we’re still very much a work in progress. But we get another shot next week, and I want to see how we do.”

After seven games, has this team played one game you consider to be at UCLA’s level?
“If we’re talking about the standard I want set, I want us to be a national contender, I want us to be Top-25 every year and to play for something. From that perspective, we’re clearly not there. Proir to this game, we lost three games to teams that are nationally ranked, and we’re not at that level right now. We’ve played well in spurts this year, had some very bright moments. But we’ve also played inconsistently and tonight was a good example of that. We couldn’t stop anyone in that first half. Good programs, great programs get to the point where they know what they’re going to be game in game out. They can have expectation of how they’re going to perform. We’re just not they’re yet.”

Do you need to talk to Rick about his future?
“Rick and I talk a lot. We talk obviously every week. Right now were going to get in a plane and go home and we’ll talk about the game. We’ve already talked a little bit tonight to this point. Different games give you a different conversation. Obviously, this one was one where we never got it rolling. We’ll talk about that. We could not stop them. Could not contain them. We need to figure out why that happened and how we can stop it from happening again.”

Sorry I didn’t have time for more on deadline.