How the Underdog UCLA Bruins Beat No. 18 Ranked Tennessee
By: Brian Kim - September 2, 2008
If you’ve been a reader of this site for some time, you know I’m a big fan of college football. And if you’re a big fan of college football, you’ve no doubt heard by now what transpired on national television yesterday – one of the most exciting games as well as the biggest upset in the first week of the 2008 college football season.
Unranked UCLA beat #18 ranked Tennessee 27-24 in an overtime thriller.
NOBODY gave UCLA a chance to win this game. The consensus among the “experts” in college football was that they would be destroyed.
Now read all the columns that wrote about the game after it ended. You’ll find that they’ll all say that the game should not have gone the way it did. Nobody expected it to. The win came way out of left field.
UCLA was already at a severe disadvantage before playing Tennessee. They had a patched up offensive line, a third string backup quarterback transferring in from a junior college, plenty of freshmen playing in the game because they didn’t have many returning starters, new coaches, a new system to implement, injuries that mounted over the preseason, etc. Tennessee had a big number of returning starters and plenty of experience and was ranked 18 in the nation. Simply put, it was essentially David vs. Goliath.
Add to that, when it came time to play the game, UCLA quarterback Kevin Craft threw FOUR interceptions in the first half. FOUR. Any other coach would’ve pulled him out of the game and put in a new QB but that didn’t happen.
Also, UCLA had 3 injuries to very key players in the first quarter of play - their running back, tight end, and wide receiver.
Things were not looking good at all from the beginning.
Yet despite all the pre-game negativity, doubt, and skeptics, and despite the horrible offense in the first half and the three major injuries, they pulled off the victory in overtime. They did the impossible. They turned water into wine.
How?
Those of you who’ve read The Hidden Secret in Think and Grow Rich will know EXACTLY how they did it.
They applied the natural process of goal achievement, the process used to achieve any goal, whether it’s winning a football game, starting a business, getting the job you want, etc.
When you hear what made somebody successful in one venture, you’ll often hear that you can apply what made them successful in that venture to another as well. It’s easily transferable. Why? It’s because they’re all using the natural process of goal achievement. It’s all the same. I guarantee you will see the same “principles” of goal achievement being repeated over and over again despite the area they were successfully applied in. I wrote more about this concept in the article – Why Success Advice In One Area of Life Can Be Applied to Another.
Let’s go deeper into this for those of you who didn’t watch the game. Those who read what I’m about to write and have read the book will easily be able to put together all the pieces and understand exactly what I’m talking about.
UCLA had a chip on their shoulder. All preseason long, they’ve been hearing how they would undoubtedly lose this game. That their offensive line was weak. That they didn’t have a great quarterback or any playmakers on the team. They had something to prove to themselves and to the college football world.
They also had a great mastermind in arguably the three best coaches in college football today, the offensive guru Norm Chow, the great defensive coordinator, Dewayne Walker and head coach Rick Neuheisel.
Rick’s mantra for the team – “Relentlessly positive”. Something they undoubtedly displayed during the game, showing the power of positive thinking indeed.
During halftime, UCLA teammates approached the QB Kevin Craft and told them that they still believed in him, that they would fight for him even though he had a lousy first half. Offensive coordinator Chow told him the game was not over, they were only down a touchdown. Head coach Rick Neuheisel comforted him by saying that he too, threw four interceptions in his first game and his college career turned out just fine.
The Kevin Craft that played the second half was a totally different person.
Coach Chow made adjustments in the second half and dictated a new set of plays resulting in a complete 180 turn for the UCLA quarterback who threw no interceptions and drove the team down the field for a field goal and a touchdown, while running down the clock and allowing the UCLA defense plenty of time to rest. The primary plans were tweaked into secondary plans and actions as adjustments were made during halftime.
The crowd was hot and into the game 68,0000 strong, urging the UCLA Bruins on.
And they were naturally persistent to the very end and won the game in overtime.
The nation was shocked. The columnists were in disbelief. The fans were going crazy as the underdog team did it. They proved everybody wrong.
And now UCLA is ranked #23 in the nation.
It would’ve been really easy from them to slip into negative thinking – reading what the press was saying about the team and the game beforehand, the injuries, the four interceptions, but the team was relentlessly positive. They had all the elements of the natural process of goal achievement.
Anyone who has read the book will undoubtedly be able to connect everything I’ve said about the game – to structure it, to understand the flow, and understand how all those principles manifested themselves naturally – positive thinking, belief, action, persistence, teamwork, mastermind, encouragement, hope, etc.
All the other books just list principles, but we all know anybody can do that. Anybody can slap together a bunch of principles of success but the process is more important than the principles because it’s through the process that the principles manifest themselves naturally. This is key. You don’t have to force t.
The UCLA Bruins undoubtedly applied the natural process of goal achievement that Napoleon Hill alluded to in Think and Grow Rich, which is also spelled out and explained through irrefutable logic and concrete examples in The Hidden Secret in Think and Grow Rich, which one can very well see and confirm with their own eyes by looking back and seeing how they’ve applied it in their own lives as well, and not even realizing it simply because it was the natural process of goal achievement they were utilizing.
If you want to pull off the upsets in life too and silence all the critics and the people who think you can’t do it, discover exactly what the natural process of goal achievement is and get to work on implementing it, and in time, you will undoubtedly prove them all wrong too.
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