LOS ANGELES — When Cade McNown returned to Southern California to settle down after his NFL career, he was immediately struck by how much the landscape had changed since his days as an All-American quarterback at UCLA.

“I’m walking around and everybody’s wearing USC sweatshirts,” McNown said. “I was like ‘Where did these people come from?'”

A decade ago, Southern California college football fans didn’t need a newspaper ad to tell them which school owned L.A. On a warm South Florida afternoon exactly 10 years ago Friday, undefeated Pac-10 champion UCLA, 60 minutes away from a spot in the first BCS national championship game, lined up against Miami. The Bruins arrived at the Orange Bowl riding a nation-leading, 20-game winning streak and a sense of invincibility. Two weeks earlier, UCLA had destroyed USC, 34-17, its eighth consecutive victory against the Trojans.

“We thought we were unstoppable, we definitely thought we were going to win the national championship,” Bruin linebacker Brendan Ayanbadejo said. “We were on the highest of highs. It was like we were one step away from the top of Mount Everest, the national championship was right there and then we let it slip away from us. Everything went wrong.”

In the final 16 agonizing minutes of the Hurricanes’ 49-45 upset, UCLA lost a 17-point lead, a shot at the national title and so much more.

“It’s hard to think back to before the Miami game,” linebacker Ramogi Huma said. “For me it consumes my memories of that season.”

The Bruin program never regained the momentum it had before Miami. Devastated by the loss, UCLA was also upset by Wisconsin in the Rose Bowl, the prelude to 10 up-and-down seasons marked by eight losses to USC, and two head coaching changes, a decade-long roller coaster ride on which UCLA has never approached the heights it reached on the way to the Orange Bowl that Saturday afternoon.

“The scoreboard doesn’t lie,” said Kris Farris, the 1998 Outland Trophy winner and a Santa Margarita High grad. “And we haven’t had that kind of success since then.”

The scoreboard, however, doesn’t tell the entire story of the impact the Miami loss and the controversy that followed had on those who played in that game. A players’ plan to wear black wristbands against the Hurricanes to protest falling minority enrollment at UC-system schools was the subject of a series of emotional team meetings the week leading up to the game. A decade later Bruin players remain divided on how the matter was handled and whether it was a distraction. And some African-American players involved in the plan said they were unfairly blamed by Coach Bob Toledo and others for the loss, leaving the players feeling estranged from the program for several years.

Toledo, fired by UCLA in 2002 and now head coach at Tulane, declined through a Tulane spokesman to be interviewed.

“Guys felt like Toledo didn’t want them to come back around the program,” linebacker Ramogi Huma said. “Some guys were hurt a little bit. You put your heart and soul into the program and then not feel like you’re welcome back. There was a real cold front there.”

It was a real storm, however, that would set the Bruins on a course that ultimately led to the turmoil. UCLA and Miami were originally scheduled to play Sept. 26. But as UCLA players prepared to board buses for LAX that Thursday they were told by Toledo the game had been postponed because of concerns over the threat of Hurricanes Georges.

Georges it seemed was the only thing that could stop the Bruins. UCLA started the 1998 season with a 10-game winning streak left over from the previous season that included a 66-3 blow out of Texas in Austin and a Cotton Bowl victory over Texas A&M.

“We had great chemistry, great relationships,” McNown said. “We loved each other. Nobody wanted to let anybody down.”

And the Bruins had McNown, a once-in-a-generation star who time and again simply refused to lose. “Every time the situation seemed hopeless, Cade found a way to win,” said defensive back Larry Atkins. McNown vomited walking to the line of scrimmage in the middle of a game against Oregon and then went on to lead UCLA to a 41-38 overtime victory. Sports Illustrated captured McNown’s moment of distress with a two-page photo. When fans asked him to autograph the photo, McNown signed, “always leave it all out on the field.”

An unexpected close call at Stanford the following week dropped the Bruins from No. 2 to No. 3 in the polls. But in blowing out USC, UCLA seemed to finally plug the holes in a young, inexperienced defense working with its third defensive coordinator in four years. Ayanbadejo seemed to spend almost as much time in Tailback U’s backfield as Trojans running backs.

“It was more lopsided than even the scoreboard showed,” Farris said. “I remember we were on the sideline going ‘Wow, it’s like they didn’t even show up.'”

UCLA was averaging 40 points and 463.9 yards total offense per game. While the Bruins remained No. 3 in the polls they were No. 2 in the BCS standings just 0.04 behind top-ranked Tennessee. On what Toledo called “Championship Saturday,” the Volunteers would meet Mississippi State in the SEC title game, undefeated Kansas State would take on Texas A&M for the Big 12 crown. UCLA was a 9½ point favorite against Miami, coming off a 66-13 loss to Syracuse, the Hurricanes’ worst defeat in 76 years.

“It should have been a lay-up for us,” McNown said.

The week before the Miami game a group of African-American players met with Olympic sprinter John Carlos in an on campus meeting set up by the Black Student Union. Carlos and Tommie Smith had been expelled from the 1968 Olympic Games after raising black gloved fists to protest racial discrimination in the U.S. In November 1996, California had passed Proposition 209, an amendment to the state constitution barring public schools from using enrollment standards based on sex or ethnicity. In the fall of 1998, African Americans, Chicanos/Latinos, and Native Americans made up 17.5 percent of UCLA’s freshman class. A year earlier those groups made up 24.4 percent of Bruin freshmen. Carlos encouraged the players to make a statement that would raise awareness.

“(Carlos) had been blackballed for taking a stand, had his life threatened,” Huma said. “People had been lynched for standing up. Here we had an opportunity to use our athletic stage and our prominence to make a statement with very few repercussions.”

The players led by Huma, Ayanbadejo and Atkins decided to wear black wristbands against Miami, a plan, Huma said, that was supported by his teammates, African-American and white. “Nobody said anything against it,” Huma said.

But McNown recalled having concerns.

“It was disappointing to be thinking about anything other than beating Miami,” McNown said. “There’s a time and place to make statements that are political or social. A few guys saw that as the time and place.”

Eventually Toledo found out about the plan and called a team meeting after practice. At one point, according Ayanbadejo, breaking down in tears, Toledo begged the players not to go forward.

“He said this wasn’t the platform, we had too much on the line,” Huma recalled. “He talked about how close it was in the BCS and that a lot of the sportswriters voting in the polls would deny us a trip to the national championship game because of the politics of that message.”

Toledo made the players a deal: If they beat Miami he would wear a black wristband in the Fiesta Bowl, the national title game. For the players, the matter seemed to be settled. But Toledo, this close to the national title, seemed unable to let the matter drop, players recalled.

The wristband issue dominated the team’s normal pre-game Friday night meeting.

“(Toledo) cancelled all the meeting to talk about the wristbands,” Huma said. “It was a distraction.”

“This team had tremendous focus right before games,” Farris said. “And when the topic was switched to something that wasn’t about the game, I just felt ‘Wow, this team is not focused.’ Even that that thought entered my mind told me ‘Oh, wow, I’m not sure how focused we are.'”

The next afternoon the focus on the Bruin sideline in the first quarter was not on the wristbands but on Ayanbadejo, who early in the game suffered a knee injury that limited him to a handful of plays. Without him the Bruins struggled to stop Miami tailback Edgerrin James. Even so UCLA appeared to have the game in hand deep in the third quarter. McNown was on his way to throwing for a school record 513 yards and five touchdowns. He would run for a sixth TD. With 1:28 left in the third quarter the Bruins led 38-21. They were a quarter away from playing for the national title.

“Then all hell broke loose,” Farris said at the time.

Led by James, Miami scored 28 points in a little over 16 minutes, taking a 49-45 lead. UCLA had one final shot but McNown’s 29-yard pass to Drew Bennett fell incomplete. “It should have never come down to that,” McNown said afterward. UCLA had rolled up 670 yards in total offense but it wasn’t enough. The Bruin defense gave up 689 yards. James ran for a Big East record 299 yards. As the Orange Bowl erupted in celebration, UCLA kicker Chris Sailer stood alone on the field, staring at the scoreboard, his vision obscured only by his tears.

Other Bruin tears would be the result of security setting off tear gas to fend off unruly fans outside the tunnel to the UCLA locker room.

Inside the locker room, the finger pointing started almost immediately. “Our defense was just horrible today,” Toledo told reporters, adding “I thought poor James was going to die from exhaustion.”

“Why don’t you ask the defensive players what the problem was,” Andy Meyers, all All-Pac-10 guard told reporters.

In the following days as the wristband plan emerged the criticism grew even more pointed and personal. Ayanbadejo said he was accused on a nationally syndicated radio show of faking his injury. “The next thing I know people are saying I took myself out of the game,” he said. “I actually tried to go back in for a couple of plays but I couldn’t do it. Why would I take myself out of the most important game of my career? But it destroyed me. I was done. I was a disease. A cancer.”

Ayanbadejo said criticism by Toledo to NFL scouts prevented him from being drafted. It would take a season in NFL Europe and three stops in the Canadian Football League before reaching the NFL. Now with Baltimore, Ayanbadejo has been made the Pro Bowl the past two seasons.”The wristbands thing was an easy scapegoat for Toledo,” Ayanbadejo said. “Toledo was always basking in the sun when everything was fine. When things were great you’d see Toledo everywhere. When we lost, when things went bad, I didn’t see him anywhere. There was no accountability with him. When things were bad he was hiding under a rock.”In the decade since the 1998 season the team has held no reunions and there are plans to hold any in the future. There are no celebrations planned for the 10th anniversary of UCLA’s last Pac-10 title.

“Why should there be?” Atkins said. “It’s not like we won the national championship.”

There are memories of the 1998 season scattered through Atkins’ Los Angeles area home, a framed Rose Bowl jersey, game balls and photographs. And every few months amongst the clutter of his garage, Atkins stumbles across a shoe box full of never worn black wristbands, a memory that refuses to be buried.

Contact the writer: sreid@ocregister.com