It was a Thursday.
September 9th, 1976, to be exact. Gerald Ford was president, “Shake Your Booty” by KC And The Sunshine Band was the number-one song in the country, and ASU, a western athletic conference school, was ranked as the third-best football team in the nation in the week one preseason AP poll.
That day was the first time ASU faced off against what would become a perennial opponent, if not a rival, the UCLA Bruins.
What happened that night made it into the New York Times sports section the next morning. It reads as follows.
“Jeff Dankworth, the quarterback, rushed for 155 yards and scored two touchdowns, and Theotis Brown, halfback, scampered for 127 yards and two more scores to lead the University of California, Los Angeles, to a 28‐10 upset of Arizona State.”
That night, 50,876 ASU fans saw the Bruins “scamper” for almost 500 yards on the ground. Not to mention, it was a nationally televised game. Dankworth, named an All-American that season, led UCLA to nine-straight wins after that. That run started in Tempe, and ASU went 4-7 that season, never recovering from that bludgeoning.
Fast forward two years to 1978, ASU joined the Pacific 8 Conference, the conference UCLA resided in, along with the University of Arizona, to turn it into the Pac-10 conference. This would have the two teams playing each other almost every year. Four-and-a-half decades later, the teams have matched up 39 times.
Despite this, their 40th matchup might be their last for the foreseeable future. ASU is taking its talents to the Big 12 conference, while UCLA joins its cross-town counterpart, USC, on an excursion to the Big 10. That means no more dueling sunsets in Tempe or Pasadena for these two programs.
In honor of this series-concluding matchup, let’s take a trip down memory lane.
From 1979 to 1986, it was all UCLA, just as it was in their first game back in 76’. ASU lost to the Bruins six times and tied once in 1983 before finally winning at the Rose Bowl 16-9 in 1986 in a grudge match.
1986 was a special year for ASU football in general. They went 10-1-1 with a win over Michigan in their second trip to the Rose Bowl that season. The Sun Devils, led by coach John Cooper, also became the first-ever Pac-10 to beat UCLA and USC in Los Angeles in the same season.
''We've been to 'Bruin Land' and 'Trojan Land' and have done well,'' Cooper said later that season in a New York Times article.
The Sun Devils ruled “Bruin Land” for the rest of the millennium. They won three out of the remaining four matchups in Pasadena until 1999. The only loss was in 1989 to a Bruins team that ended that season 3-7-1. 1996 was a highlight year for the rivalry at the Rose Bowl. ASU, the fourth-best team in the country at the time, defeated UCLA 42-34 in front of 66,107 people.
The Sun Devils were down 28-14 at halftime. The second half proceeded to provide one of the many legendary moments in the legacy of Jake “The Snake” Plummer.
With seven minutes and twenty-four seconds left in the fourth quarter, Plummer threw for a touchdown, ran in a touchdown, and even caught a touchdown. His touchdown catch was later named “The Snake Pass.”, which is still talked about today among Sun Devil faithful.
The early 2000s didn’t provide much stardom from the Sun Devils or the Bruins; an active rivalry turned dormant.
On Nov. 12th, 2005, it erupted again in a back-and-forth brawl that resulted in a 45-35 win for the No.14 Bruins, courtesy of quarterback Drew Olsen and his 510 passing yards and five touchdowns on the outgunned Sun Devil defense.
UCLA coach Karl Dorrell said postgame that going to play the number one team in the country, USC, the week after would be “easier” after the win over ASU. They proceeded to lose by 47 points a few weeks later.
2010 saw the Bruins come to the then-named Sun Devil Stadium, looking to keep their bowl chances alive. ASU and UCLA had four wins with two games remaining on the schedule. A win in this game would bolster their chance to play in a bowl game. The Associated Press called it a “playoff game between two losing teams."
UCLA jumped out to a 17-point lead in the first quarter. If that wasn’t bad enough, Sun Devil starting quarterback Steven Threet was sidelined with a concussion soon after. ASU had to bring in a lanky 6-foot-7-inch tall sophomore from Kalispell, MT, Brock Osweiler. His job? Come back and win this football game.
Three quarters and 55 points later, he overachieved.
Osweiler guided the Sun Devils back into the game by passing for three touchdowns to give ASU a 21-20 lead going into halftime. The Bruins couldn’t recover from this punch in the mouth as the Sun Devils racked up 34 more points in the second half for the 55-34 win on Senior Day, shutting the door on UCLA’s bowl chances.
Their most recent matchup saw the No.12 Bruins, led by quarterback Dorian Thompson-Robinson, come into Tempe last year and thrash ASU, dropping 50 points in the 14-point UCLA win. Thompson-Robinson hurdled a defender on a 33-yard touchdown run for one of his four touchdowns on the day.
Now, back to the present day. The overall record between the two teams since Dankworth’s All-American performance back in 1976 lays out like this. UCLA leads the series with the Sun Devils with a record of 23 wins compared to ASU’s 15 with the one tie in 1986.
Even though this weekend won’t be an overall series decider or a College Football Playoff matchup, it marks the end of an era for two programs that have become all too familiar with each other.
All that’s known between the programs is the history made in their decades-long rivalry, which at least for the foreseeable future, has finished its most recent chapter.
Edited by Alfred Smith III, Walker Smith and Shane Brennan
Reach the reporter at vdeange1@asu.edu and follow @vdeangelis2024 on X.
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Vincent Deangelis is a full-time reporter for the sports department at The State Press. He has previously worked for Arizona PBS and AZPreps365.com.
