touchdown passes were caught by a sophomore wide receiver from San Diego named Karl Dorrell, a future Neuheisel assistant coach and later his predecessor as the UCLA head coach. The victory vaulted the Bruins, unranked through most of the season, into the top 25 in wire service polls. Much like his rise to stardom at UCLA, the road to the victory was a bumpy one. Neuheisel and two other players on the defensive side of the ball suffered from food poisoning hours before the Rose Bowl and it was unsure that Neuheisel would start. Neuheisel would end up starting the game. He also set an NCAA record that year for single game pass completion percentage (since broken) by completing 25 of 27 passes (92.6%) in a Pac-10 win over Washington. In 1998, Neuheisel was inducted into the Rose Bowl Hall of Fame. Neuheisel was named to the Pac-10 All-Academic team and graduated from UCLA in May 1984 with a B.A. in political science and a 3.4 GPA. Neuheisel still holds the UCLA single season record for completion percentage, completed 185 of 267 passes (69.3%) for 2,245 yards in the 1983 season. He was also a member of Sigma Nu fraternity while a student. Professional Neuheisel bypassed the 1984 NFL draft and joined the San Antonio Gunslingers of the USFL, where he played the 1984 and 1985 seasons as the Gunslingers' starter. Never considered a major NFL prospect, he went undrafted in the NFL's supplemental draft of USFL players and his career in that league was extremely brief, lasting only five weeks. In the 1987 season, Neuheisel signed with the San Diego Chargers as a replacement player during the three-game long players' strike. He spent the last two weeks of that season as a backup with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, not playing in either game. Coaching career Early years as assistant While attending USC Law School on an NCAA postgraduate scholarship, Neuheisel served as a graduate assistant with UCLA, where he tutored Troy Aikman. He graduated with a Juris Doctor (J.D.) from USC in 1990 and passed the Arizona State Bar in May 1991 and the Washington, D.C. Bar in March 1993. He later became a full-time assistant coach in 1988, and stayed at UCLA through the 1993 season as the quarterback coach. Hard feelings emerged with UCLA coach Terry Donahue in 1994, when Donahue picked Texas A&M assistant Bob Toledo