`JUST WINNING SHOULD BE ENOUGH'.

Byline: KAREN CROUSE

An undefeated football season is a gem, to be turned over in the light and admired. Like diamonds, no two are exactly alike.

Who's to say No. 1 Tennessee's 24-carat record is any better than UCLA's, Kansas State's or Tulane's? They're all precious. The pity is that people can't simply admire their brilliance.

They have to look for flaws.

Viewed from under a magnifying lens, the purity of a UCLA season that has included last-second wins over Stanford and Oregon State becomes suspect. Ditto the cut of the Kansas State and Tulane schedules.

It's getting ridiculous, this nitpicking we do under the guise of naming a national champion. Pretty soon we'll have whittled success down to a definition as narrow as Kansas State coach Bill Snyder's personality, and what joy will there be in that?

Like tail-gating parties, finding weaknesses in winning is a time-honored tradition. Bob Toledo, the head coach at UCLA, was an assistant at USC for three seasons in the late 1970s, during which time the Trojans went 31-6. They lost one game in 1976 and again in 1978 but that wasn't good enough for some boosters.

Twenty-two years later, Toledo remembers as though it were yesterday his introduction to grating expectations.

``We had just beaten Notre Dame but they had scored on the last play,'' Toledo said. ``I went to (a university athletic donor function) and a man came up to me and said, `What's the matter with you?' He was mad because we didn't cover the point spread.''

Those were the days, when gamblers were the only ones grumbling. The Bowl Championship Series formula concocted this year to produce a national title game has whipped up enough analysis and antagonism to leave interested outsiders frothing through June.

You know this isn't Pleasantville when somebody will sit with the telephone receiver to his ear for 106 minutes just so he can inform a sports-talk radio audience that Kansas State really stinks.

The buzz that used to surround a successful season is giving way to buzzards. Some people don't even have the decency to wait for a loss to start picking a program apart.

``It's gotten worse than ever,'' Toledo said. ``Because of all this poll stuff, it's gotten to the point where people don't appreciate winning anymore. It's hard enough to win. Just winning should be enough.''

Actually, just graduating players should be sufficient. But that's another column.

The Bruins shouldn't have to apologize for an unbeaten streak that has reached 19 games. If running the table was so easy, more teams would do it. Since 1930 there have been only four USC or UCLA football teams that have managed to go unbeaten and untied: the 1932, 1962 and 1972 Trojans and the 1954 Bruins.

Toledo knows firsthand how elusive perfection is, having flirted with it as an assistant at Texas A&M in 1992. On the strength of a slew of close wins, the Aggies took a 12-0 record into their postseason showdown against Notre Dame in the Cotton Bowl. The Irish handed the Aggies a 28-3 defeat that in a strange, sad way, relieved A&M of its misery.

As Toledo explained it, ``We weren't winning big enough. We weren't winning pretty enough. We were 12-0 and we had to listen to people tell us how bad we were. I remember one of the coaches on the staff making the comment that he'd rather be 8-4.''

Toledo doesn't want anyone involved with this year's UCLA program talking like that. So he makes it a point to keep reminding the Bruins they're in the midst of an extraordinary experience, lest they turn on the sports-talk radio shows or read the newspapers and begin to believe otherwise.

``We can't listen to fans tell us how bad we are when we've won 19 in a row,'' Toledo said. ``That's not right. There's something wrong with that.''

There's also something very disturbing about the mindset of people who would have you believe it's better to win by 30 than by 17. It's a sad day in higher education when the lesson being absorbed is that you should run up the score before giving third stringers and other seldom-used players some priceless game experience.

Fortunately, to this point the Bruins have been able to filter out the pharisaism and focus on what's really important. They don't need a win over USC Saturday to feel worthy, not when they've already beaten Washington in Seattle for the first time since 1990, secured a Rose Bowl berth for the first time since 1993 and matched the 1954 team's victory total.

The UCLA players aren't automatons, marching joylessly toward college football's summit. They're not too jaded to appreciate their gem of a season. Too bad the same can't be said of the rest of us.