NEARLY TWO YEARS ago, on a Saturday night in Pasadena with little to play for between a 7-4 UCLA team and a 5-6 Cal team, Dante Moore and Fernando Mendoza faced off at the Rose Bowl in the last regular-season game of the year.

Moore was capping off a roller-coaster freshman season with the Bruins during which he went from having the starting job, to losing it and then having it again. It was his sixth start of the year. Mendoza, meanwhile, had started his own freshman campaign as the third-string quarterback before taking hold of the gig for the Golden Bears over the last seven games of the season.

Though their journeys to that point had been far from similar, both quarterbacks had been thrown right into the cauldron as freshmen and asked to build experience on the fly while hel

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