DG channeling years of notes from Bruins Nation. Pay close attention to his remark on assistant coaching salaries and look up all of our previous posts on the topic. We never missed "the sign" which apparently was lost in the morons from LA's traditional media. GO BRUINS. -N

Selections from Dan Guerrero's press conference announcing Karl Dorrell's dismissal this afternoon, as posted on Perelman's blog:

DG's expectations for the football program.

"I believe we can be a national player and you can define that however you want. I believe UCLA could be a program that is in the national rankings every year, that can knock on a BCS door, that can win the Pac-10 Conference. If you win the Pac-10 Conference, you have a chance to play in the Rose Bowl and you maybe have a chance to play in a national championship game. Is it hard here? Yeah, there are some constraints, there's no question about that. But, this is a great institution, a great place to be. And I believe that all of those things are possible; you cannot concede that they are not." DG's thoughts regarding the upcoming coaching search: "I think if you were to talk about a prerequisite that's pretty important, it certainly would be [prior head coaching experience]. We will look at a broad array of candidates for this position and obviously someone who has had successful head coaching experience would be an ideal candidate. That being said, you never say never. You can to look at the candidate pool, you have to evaluate what's out there. This is not a place for just any coach as you well know."

"I think it's important that someone understands the West Coast to a certain degree, that's recruited out here. But that's not an absolute. We need to get the best coach that is the right fit for us, that understands our culture, that understands we want things done with integrity, that's just a great fit for our university. UCLA ties are not an absolute."

Interesting quotes from DG regarding the fiscal health of the athletic department, and of the widely maligned level of salaries paid to our assistant coaches. "One of the positives during our tenure here in the last five years is we've really been able to build the resource base in our [athletic] program in a general sense. We raised a budget from $42 million when I first came in here to $60 million and we're still in the black. That tells you that we've done some things that are very positive and will allow us the opportunity to be more competitive in the marketplace as we move forward.

"Our assistant coaching pool is not wanting. Many of you believe that we're on the bottom of the barrel on the assistant coaching pool. We receive salary surveys from various sources; our assistant coaching pool may be second in the conference and I say that only because we don't know what one of the private schools pays their coaches. We built that assistant coaching pool over the course of the last three years to be very, very competitive in the marketplace. Many of you kind of missed that as we did that."

And for all of you Streeter-appointed closet racists out there that thought DG had your back, think again: "I can't speak for Karl in terms of what he feels and what he believes [about racial factors]. But I will tell you this: the issue of his particular situation has nothing to do with race. It really is about performance and it's really about my expectation for this program as we move forward..."