Arizona, UCLA aim to bounce back after losing seasons

’Cats Rich Rod speaks of program ‘reboot’ at Pac-12 media day

LOS ANGELES — Arizona had the best rushing offense in the Pac-12 last season at 235 yards per game, UCLA the worst at a paltry 84.2.

Other than the 150.8 yards on the ground that separated them, the Wildcats and Bruins had more in common than they would have liked with both teams plummeting to their first losing seasons under their respective head coaches.

Now Arizona’s Rich Rodriguez and UCLA’s Jim Mora would like to be linked again, this time for engineering significant and perhaps job-saving turnarounds in their sixth seasons.

These two decorated, sought-after coaches fell to low points in their careers last fall. Rodriguez’s Wildcats went 3-9 and failed to make a bowl game for the first time in his tenure, while Mora’s Bruins went 4-8 and ended his streak of five straight seasons with at least eight wins in his first college football head coaching job.

Rodriguez and Mora cited the same approach to self-evaluation in hopes of getting their programs back on track.

“I don’t think you should bury your head in the sand and kind of pretend it wasn’t there,” Rodriguez said at Pac-12 media days on Wednesday. “You’ve got to evaluate yourself, your staff, your program, and everything that you’re doing so you don’t go through it again.”

Said Mora: “The first thing you do is point your finger at yourself. You say, ‘Where did I not do a good enough job, and how are we going to learn from this?’”

For UCLA, the education starts and ends on offense. Star quarterback