Bruins

Troy Aikman arrived at UCLA in 1987 and left two years later with a reputation that would outlast his college career: the quarterback who steadied a program built on a downfield passing tradition, then went on to a Pro Football Hall of Fame career. He is one name among several the Bruins claim in Canton — Kenny Easley, Jonathan Ogden, Jackie Slater — but Aikman's is the one people in Los Angeles still measure other UCLA quarterbacks against.

The program traces back to 1919, when the team played under other names before settling on the Bruins in 1926. What it built its identity around was Southern California itself, and the fixture that matters most is the one against USC, played for the Victory Bell and known simply as the Crosstown Rivalry — a game with no love lost on either sideline.

UCLA has one national championship to its name, awarded by the Coaches' Poll in 1954 under Red Sanders, and a longer run of conference titles that stretches from the old Pacific Coast Conference through the Pac-12 years, including back-to-back Pac-12 South crowns in 2011 and 2012. Terry Donahue, who coached from 1976 to 1995, remains the winningest man to hold the job, a stretch long enough that entire eras of Bruins players never knew another coach.

Home games are played at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, a ground the Bruins moved into in 1982 after years at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, seating just short of 90,000. In 2024 the program left the Pac-12 behind for the Big Ten, a conference with none of the Southern California history the rivalry with USC was built on, and a full national championship since 1954 is still the thing the Rose Bowl has been waiting to see again.