Entering Saturday, the UCLA Bruins had perhaps been the biggest laughingstock in all of college football so far this season, as they had looked terrible in going 0-4 and had already overhauled their coaching staff.
A date against the 7th-ranked Penn State Nittany Lions, therefore, did not seem ideal. So of course, all the Bruins did was pull off a massive upset, beating the Nittany Lions 42-37.
It marked the first time since 1985 — 40 years — that a team with an 0-4 record or worse beat a top 10 team in the country.
The last time it happened before Saturday, the BYU Cougars were the team on the wrong end of things. Ranked No. 7 like Penn State, the defending national champion Cougars faced an 0-6 UTEP Miners team on October 26, 1985.
BYU lost 23-16. In 2010 — 25 years after the game — the Deseret News looked back on it before the two sides met in the New Mexico Bowl (the Cougars won that one, 52-24).
“I remember we had a hard time stopping them,” legendary BYU coach LaVell Edwards told the Deseret News in 2010. “I don’t even remember the score. It was a case where we just didn’t play well. We weren’t as prepared mentally as we should have been.”
UTEP fans tore down the goalposts, the Deseret News reported, something that many joked about Saturday given the sparse crowds that have become the norm at UCLA home games lately.
The result was so surprising that there began to be accusations that UTEP had tapped BYU’s phone lines for the game, the Deseret News reported.
As Ralph D. Russo of the Associated Press observed Saturday, the Cougars went on to finish the 1985 season with an 11-3 record, and the Deseret News reported in 2010 that they finished the campaign ranked No. 16 in the country.