Two days after tensions flared going into halftime of the crosstown rivalry game, DeShaun Foster remained salty about UCLA being the only team punished.
Three unsportsmanlike conduct penalties were called against the Bruins after an exchange that Foster said he was told started when a USC player punched UCLA wide receiver Kwazi Gilmer, leading to jawing between both teams on the way to the locker room.
“It could have been an offsetting penalty and then you move on, but they chose to give us three and them none,” Foster said Monday. “So I guess we were the only ones out there.”
Foster disclosed that Corey Miller, the team’s head football performance coach, received one of the penalties in addition to Gilmer and safety Bryan Addison. Foster said Miller was trying to keep the peace, not escalate tensions.
“He was kind of just separating people and keeping our guys from going onto their side,” Foster said, “so I think that they just kind of saw a big guy and was threatened by what he was doing, but he was just separating — keeping our guys from getting any closer to them.
“You’re just disappointed if anybody gets a call, especially people that understand the discipline because he’s somebody that’s teaching that to our players downstairs [in the weight room], so it was very unfortunate that that happened.”
The penalties forced UCLA to kick off from its own five-yard line to start the third quarter, giving the Trojans the ball at their own 48-yard line after Makai Lemon’s 16-yard return. But USC failed to pick up a first down, giving the ball back to the Bruins after quarterback Jayden Maiava’s fourth-down pass fell incomplete.
Regardless of whether the fracas was fairly settled by officials, Foster acknowledged that discipline continues to be an issue for a team that committed eight penalties to USC’s two. UCLA has been the most-penalized team in the Big Ten this season, its 90 penalties tying East Carolina for No. 126 among 133 major college teams.
Foster said he’s benched players after receiving unsportsmanlike conduct penalties this season as part of his efforts to enforce discipline, one of the three pillars of the culture he is trying to instill.
“Most of those players have been taken out after that play of any unsportsmanlike penalty that they’ve gotten,” Foster said, “so yeah, we do all of that. … This game, I didn’t get to see most of that stuff and it’s not on camera, so you can’t see what happened — I was already running into the tunnel and came back out because it was right at halftime, but during the season, most of the other stuff I was able to see and we’d get those guys out at that time.”
