AHC: Competitive UCLA

With a POD before 2000, but after 1970, make the UCLA football team viable competition to USC. Bonus points if the Reggie Bush scandal still happens.
 
I think an important question to ask is, why is Cal competitive? While I don't follow college football much except to know who the winners and losers are, I know that they were in the top 10 quite a bit recently. Now, granted, there's not as much competition for them in the Bay Area excet for the very prestigious Stanford Unviesity, but Cal is still part of the Unviersity of California system, if I'm not mistaken.

So, while I don't know a lot, I do know that Cal is a key.

Also, looking at their record on Wikipedia, they had sporadic success in the 1970-2000 era you ment5ion, mostly due to Troy Aikman I'm sure:). Was there an AD change that might have made a difference? could we get Joe Paterno to take a pro job (which I recall he almost did) in 1970 and then return to college to replace Dick Vermeil? Or have Vermeil stay? (The advantage of Paterno, of course, is that we can butterfly away, well, that whole mess. And if you don't know what I mean, you're better off that way.:()
 
Except he specified UCLA not Cal lol. Which is funny as until quite recently they were at least decent at football. Your real problem goes further back than 1970 tho UCLA is a basketball/baseball school not football, Changing the culture of the AD requires an earlier POD.
 
I agree with the previous post. Few schools can really compete at the top level in both football and basketball (the two most expensive college sports), at least not for a long period of time. If anything, UCLA has done a halfway decent job of competing in football. While they're no where near the top 25, they have made bowl games in recent years. The hiring of Jim Mora, Jr. will probably help as well. But for UCLA to really compete they would need to invest heavily in football at least a generation ago.
 
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