The Eye Test: UCLA Backslides in Major Way Against Washington

UCLA's postseason hopes, and perhaps the Deshaun Foster era, are hanging by a thread.

Ethan Garbers (Photo credit: Steven Bisig-Imagn Images via uclabruins.com)

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Well, that happened.

As a mea culpa, I will admit that I have not done a good job of being realistic in these Eye Tests for the past few games. Winning can create an intoxicating feeling, and it was easier to buy into the narrative that the team was playing good football rather than they were taking advantage of some broken opponents. I did keep mentioning from time to time that it was hard to know exactly how much better this team has gotten given the situation, but I don’t think I took my own advice on that, so I apologize.

This was the brutal awakening for UCLA that had been coming for weeks. Washington was the better team for most of this game, with a late score by the Bruins only serving to make the final score look closer than it actually was. UCLA had no answer on offense, as the run game went back to being useless while Ethan Garbers continued his poor overall season, and the defense ultimately ran out of gas, unable to hold Washington on their own for four quarters. Even the special teams were poor in this one, with Brody Richter having by far his worst punting performance of the season.

If I had to make a statement, this is closer to the way the team has performed this season, and not a great sign for Deshaun Foster going forward. All positive momentum that had been built up was instantly dashed, and now the Bruins need to find a way to salvage this season, and in the process salvage Foster’s tenure as head coach.

Let’s break this down.

Offense

Quarterback: D-

Ethan Garbers has to be better, full stop. So much of this offense rests on his ability to stay composed and on time, and he has not shown the ability to do that consistently this year. It is a frustrating outcome for the senior, to be sure, but also indicative of just how poor UCLA’s talent level and offensive scheme is at this point that Garbers has to be nearly perfect to give the Bruins an opportunity to win.

When he’s not perfect, you get games like this. Garbers did not throw an interception in this game, but he certainly tried to, and his fumble to erase what should have been a UCLA scoring drive undid all the hard work the defense did to set the offense up in good field position. Of Garbers 267 yards passing, 61 of them came on the final possession when Washington stopped caring since the game was over. Just not a good performance from him.

Offensive Line: NP

Look, it was not a good performance from the line, and then they lost two more left tackles in the course of the game, putting us at the 5th different starter at that spot for the season. The rest of the line, which has played together for multiple games now, was not any better, with every player having a poor game. This line is maybe good enough to survive a game with one player having an off game; two players is maybe too much and the entire unit playing bad is a recipe for disaster. UCLA could not run the ball and barely provided a modicum of pass protection.

Overall: D+

Just a terrible performance from the offense, specifically from the two units that cannot afford to have bad games. It does make look at the previous games with more of a critical eye, however.

There was a moment during the broadcast where Fox was hyping up UCLA’s offensive improvement in recent weeks, showing what they had done in the first six games and the improvement they had undergone during the win streak, and it hit me in that moment that UCLA had simply gone from a garbage offense to “garbage, but someone sprayed some Febreeze over the pile”. UCLA’s offense has not gotten better in a sustainable way; instead, the three-game win streak was offensively keyed by a career performance from Garbers, and excellent defensive performance against a rookie quarterback that set UCLA up for success, and the one good rushing performance of the year. None of those victories was keyed by steady improvement, but rather a one-off performance that was not seen again. I’m willing to state at this point that UCLA’s offense has not improved over the course of the season, and rather that the talent has only played to its potential for brief moments.

Defense

Rush Defense: B-

Pass Defense: B

Overall: B

One of the benefits of breaking down the grades the way we do is that you can better explain how something happened. In this case, a lot of the blame for this game goes to the offense and special teams, as the defense more or less did its job.

UCLA held Washington to only 305 yards and grabbed two interceptions of Will Rogers that knocked him out of the game (and looks to have ended his starting career at Washington). The defense gave the offense three drives that started on the Washington side of the field, and the UCLA offense was only able to score six points off that (on the flip side, Washington had two drives that stared inside the UCLA 40 and scored touchdowns on both of them).

My read on this game is that the defensive players just ran out of gas in the second half, and that mostly bears out in both the scoring (17 points coming on three straight drives to end the 3rd quarter through the 4th) and in some of the deeper stats. Consider rushing, for example: in the first half, the Bruins held Washington to only 31 yards on 11 carries, but in the second half, Washington was able to get 92 yards on 19 carries. When you aren’t getting support from your offense, eventually you’re going to run out of steam and start getting gashed.

This is a general B grade though because, while the defense was really good for most of this game, the last third of it was not great, and while fatigue was definitely a factor, it does speak to a worrying trend that had taken place during the win streak where UCLA would race out to an early lead and then hang on for dear life as the opposing teams got in a late rhythm. A change at quarterback keyed this particular run, as Demond Williams Jr. presented a very different challenge that the UCLA defense was seemingly unprepared for. The second-half failing does fall in line with the second halves of the Rutgers and Nebraska games (Iowa as well, though I think the defense had more of an impact in that 2nd half due to the general ineptness of Iowa’s offense). The difference in those games is that the UCLA offense had found success in the first half to give UCLA some cushion, while in this game there was no cushion, and thus a 14-10 halftime deficit ballooned to 31-13 rather quickly. I’m not sure how much of this falloff is scheme-based or personnel-based, but I would lean towards the latter.

Special Teams

Overall: C-

Brody Richter had some dreadful punts in this game, with his second one setting Washington up inside UCLA territory, eventually resulting in a touchdown. Mateen Bhaghani missed a 44-yard field goal, which isn’t an automatic kick for a college kicker but was still makeable and was the final nail in the coffin of any comeback attempt for the Bruins. Just not good.

Coaching

Offensive Gameplan: C

This gameplan just screamed about getting high off your own supply. The offensive staff must have felt that things like the rushing success against Iowa was sustainable, or that the offensive line would hold up against the pass rush, and none of it proved to be true. That’s bad in and of itself, but once it became clear that there needed to be changes in strategy, we got…nothing. UCLA did not switch up to more short passes to supplant the rushing attack, nor did we see the pocket get moved to create more time for Garbers. Just bizarre.

That said, I’m also not going to completely punish the offensive gameplan grade because the team did get into Washington territory on multiple occasions, only for one of the various execution failures (fumbles, missed kicks, penalties) to rear its head and stop a potential score. If UCLA played clean football, this game would likely be much closer.

Defensive Gameplan: C-

I think my main problem here is how UCLA defended the screen pass. Or rather, how it continually looked like it had never seen a screen pass before this game and had no idea how to defend it. This is weird, because the screen pass seems like a staple part of Eric Bieniemy’s offense, and the Bruins see that every day in practice. I’m not going to look up the exact total, but it felt like every time Washington ran a screen pass, it went for a huge chunk of yardage, and especially in the second half, those chunks became backbreakers.

I’m also docking points for not having much of a gameplan for when Demond Williams Jr. came into the game. The UCLA coaching staff had to have been aware that Washington would have Williams Jr. play at least part of the game given the Huskies had shown some specific packages for him against Penn State, but once the reins were handed to Williams Jr. fully in the second half, the UCLA coaching staff had no answer, and Williams Jr. was given free rein to wreak havoc all over UCLA’s secondary. The coaching on defense has been the major bright spot on this team all season, so to see them struggle as much as they did was concerning, to say the least.

Overall: D+

UCLA did not seem ready for this game, which is problem #1 for a team that is not good enough to coast by on talent. The Bruins have to be locked in with an excellent gameplan in every game to have a shot at winning, and from the opening snap it appeared that only the defense was interested in winning.

Problem #2 is that discipline is still a major issue for this team, and at this point I am willing to state it will always be an issue under Deshaun Foster. UCLA had nine penalties in this game (well, 11, but one was offsetting and another other was declined) that hurt the team in a variety of ways, from multiple false starts that killed various drives by the offensive line to a roughing the passer that negated an interception by the defense and ultimately led to a touchdown. The simple truth is that Foster is only in this job because the players campaigned for him, and if you owe your job to a bunch of 18 to 22-year-olds, then it is going to be incredibly difficult to turn around and try and discipline them for their mistakes. This is a thing you learn in both teaching and coaching, but it is impossible to try and handle any disciplinary issues when the people you are trying to discipline know they have power over you.

But maybe the biggest problem is that there never seemed to be a Plan B if things went awry with the initial gameplan on either side. On defense, Washington switched quarterbacks and UCLA did not have an answer for the stylistic difference. On offense, UCLA could not run the ball but continued to try despite all evidence (and despite losing even more offensive linemen in the course of the game). The mark of good coaching is whether you can adapt if something is not working, and in this game, the coaching staff failed to adapt at all. That’s a major problem.

Trending

Trend: Down

No other way it could be trending after this disaster of a game. UCLA needs to win out to make a bowl game, which means beating a motivated Southern Cal team and then getting up the next week to face a Fresno State team that will be keyed in for that game as usual. 5-7 feels like the likely outcome, but 4-8 is on the table and if that were to happen, we would have to consider this first season for Deshaun Foster to be a major failure that would lead to more questions than answers.

Final Composite

Offense grade: D+ (1.3)

Defense grade: B (3.0)

Special Teams grade: C- (1.7)

Coaching grade: D+ (1.3)

Trending: Down

Final grade for Washington Huskies: C- (1.8)

And as a reminder, here are the scores from other games this year:

Hawai’i Rainbow Warriors: C (1.9)

Indiana Hoosiers: F (0.6)

LSU Tigers: C (1.9)

Oregon Ducks: D+ (1.3)

Penn State Nittany Lions: C+ (2.2)

Minnesota Golden Gophers: C- (1.75)

Rutgers Scarlet Knights: C+ (2.3)

Nebraska Cornhuskers: B+ (3.2)

Iowa Hawkeyes: A- (3.6)

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The Crosstown Rivalry game is always an important one for the general psyche of UCLA fans, but it may be even more important for the overall trajectory of Deshaun Foster’s program. A loss to Southern Cal would guarantee that UCLA would miss a bowl game in Year One, which would make it much harder to bring in recruits and sell them on an improving program. More importantly, it would make it harder to sell the program to donors that Foster knows what he is doing, which would lead to NIL funds drying up, making it even harder to bring in the talent needed to improve the program.

This was always going to be the biggest challenge for Deshaun Foster when he took over as head coach. Martin Jarmond, in his infinite foolishness, sold Foster as a continuation of the Chip Kelly era, completely oblivious to the fact that the vast majority of the fanbase was fed up with said era. Foster’s best chance at finding success would be proving he had the coaching chops to succeed right out of the gate, yet it is hard to say that has taken place, and UCLA games continue to be filled with opposing fans as the Bruin fanbase continues to stay home. Winning the Victory Bell would give Foster something to sell to fans and recruits. It might be the most important game of his career.

Go Bruins.

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