Michael Alves feared there would be some accompanying bad news earlier this week when he received a text message from UCLA offensive line coach Hank Fraley informing him that he would be playing with the starters in practice the next day.
“At first I was concerned, like, is someone injured or something?” Alves recalled Friday. “Because I mean, when you move from twos to ones it’s usually because someone gets injured because we had a solid group of ones.”
No one was injured. The Bruins just wanted to get a look at how the redshirt freshman would fare as the first-team right guard.