Thursday’s UCLA sound bites from practice

As you’re reading this, the UCLA football team will likely be on its way to see AT&T Stadium the day before its game against Texas.

More than anything, the team is hoping to get over the shock value of the House That Jerry built. Those details and more can be found in a previous blog.

Also check out a post on how the Bruins won’t benefit a ton, recruiting-wise, from the trip to the Lone Star State, and a notebook from Chris Foster.

If you want to get some live analysis of the game on Saturday, we’ll be running a live blog on UCLA Now starting about 15-20 minutes before kickoff. Stop by, it’ll be fun. If the demand is there, I might even tell some jokes.

Light on quotes today; the only Bruin who spoke Thursday was head coach Jim Mora:

Mora

On Texas coach Charlie Strong taking over a new program: “I don’t know what he’s going through. I don’t pay attention to that. I can tell you that here, this group of players just embraced everything we asked them to do and be immediately. Sure, there’s a little bit of a shock and it’s never smooth sailing, but the guys here, they wanted to be a team that garnered respect around the country, so they were very, very open to the changes that we wanted to make.”

On scheduling marquee teams like Texas: “Like I’ve said many times, there’s a couple different ways you can look at it. You can schedule teams that you’re almost guaranteed, well, there are no guarantees in athletics, but close to guaranteed to beating. But how much are you going to grow as a team and how much are you going to learn about yourself as a team if you do that? Or you can do what these guys like to do and that’s play against really good competition. These players want to play against the best.”

For more Bruin observations, follow Everett Cook on Twitter @everettcook