As New Star Rises, Will Lavin Fall?

He strolled into the center of wild, wild Westwood a couple of hours after high noon.

He was dressed in a dark suit. He wore a cold stare. He carried a black folder, the harsh contents of which he recited as if he were ordering breakfast.

“This was not a healthy environment.”

“There had been an erosion of confidence.”

“I did not want to continue in this situation another year.”

His hands remained folded. His face showed no sweat. His football coach had survived seven stress-filled years. He tossed him out the door in about 10 cool seconds.

“He wanted the opportunity to coach the bowl game,” said Dan Guerrero. “I felt that was not a good idea.”

What former UCLA administrators needed years to figure out, Guerrero handled in the matter of one day, firing Bob Toledo before lunch, beginning his new coaching search before dinner.

With all respect to the memory of Kevin Malone ... now this is a new sheriff.

This Guerrero showed the strength of Pedro and the speed of Vladimir.

He’s been in the job five months and already dismissed one of his two high-profile coaches, a guy whose embracing nature had previously been good enough to overshadow his program’s deficiencies.

A bad day for Bob Toledo, and perhaps a worse day for Steve Lavin.

The two struggling coaches, with similar starting dates and contracts, had survived under a shared cocoon.

Guerrero has stripped away that security like a yawning man pulling back a shower curtain.

“The Kevlar vests are gone,” said one bystander. “Bullets are flying.”

Lavin better stay low, because he could be next.

Lavin has never failed to qualify for the postseason, unlike Toledo, nor has he endured the off-court problems of Toledo’s program. But he’s not going to be able to escape the notion that Toledo’s basting has turned him into a lame duck.

Everything Guerrero said was wrong with Toledo’s regime applies to Lavin’s regime.

Guerrero said he was disturbed with the image of the UCLA football program beyond wins and losses, feeling that it had sunk beyond repair.

He said it wasn’t just that Toledo’s Bruins had lost recent important games, but it was how they were losing them.

“What we do, and how we do it, is sometimes as important as what we produce,” Guerrero said. “One of my absolutes is that the students will represent the school with distinction.”

In other words, for Lavin, those November losses to teams named after video games could haunt.

When asked about his basketball coach, Guerrero initially brushed it aside, saying, “We’re talking about football here.”

Asked again, he said it “wasn’t an appropriate time” to discuss Lavin.

That was the exact message he sent me last week when I first asked him about Bob Toledo.

“Are you sure?” Guerrero said with a tiny smile. “I’ll have to check my notes.”

Bruin coaches in all sports, long considered safe in the haven of an athletic department that moves as slow as the traffic on nearby Sunset Boulevard, should check their resumes.

“At the end of the day, the job of the UCLA basketball coach has not changed,” Lavin said Monday night. “You have to produce.”

But if Guerrero is to be believed, you may have to do more.

Toledo and his supporters thought he might be safe because he was the coach of a young and improving team.

Guerrero said he was at risk because it was a young team.

“We wanted to make a change before it was too late,” he said.

Toledo thought he did well with a fourth-place team that was picked to finish sixth in the conference.

Guerrero said he wasn’t pleased that the Bruins would ever be picked that low, period.

“My question is, why are we rated as a preseason sixth-place team?” he said.

All students beware: Guerrero does not grade on a curve.

He spoke about UCLA football Monday the way those guys across town speak about their team, even as his words were costing him about $1.3 million in buyout money.

“Football at UCLA is the economic driver of our entire athletic program,” he said. “If a change needs to be made, we will make it.”

Speaking about those guys across town ...

While Guerrero obviously entered the season with some serious reservations about Toledo’s program, sources say the determining factor was this year’s blowout by USC.

After that, only consecutive blowouts of Washington State and the Bruins’ bowl opponent would have saved him, and maybe not even then.

“I think it was big, I think it was very important,” Guerrero said of the 52-21 loss to the Trojans. “We want every one of those games to be competitive. It’s important to the city of L.A. It’s important to the West Coast. Its important that we restore that tradition.”

When it comes to UCLA football, sometimes it’s hard to remember that it has tradition.

During 20 consecutive victories, Toledo revived it.

In the troubled four-year aftermath, he misplaced it.

In the past, this being football and these being the gutty little Bruins, he would have been given time to find it again.

But that was then, and this is Dan Guerrero, who shook the university by its lapels Monday in proclaiming that it shouldn’t have been lost in the first place.

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Bill Plaschke can be reached at [email protected].