The Eye Test: Utah Shows that UCLA is Who We Thought They Were

An autopsy of a disaster.

Anthony Woods (Photo credit: uclabruins.com)

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Well, can’t say I’m surprised by this one.

During the season preview, I stated that I did not like UCLA’s chances of beating Utah, but even I could not foresee this level of beatdown on the horizon. The Bruins were uncompetitive against their former conference rivals, looking more like a Conference USA team than one that is supposed to represent the Big Ten, one of the richest conferences around. It was an embarrassing scene, with the only positive being that only 35,000 people were witnesses to it in person, so maybe the program can pretend that a gas leak occurred.

None of this should have been surprising. Deshaun Foster was ridiculously unqualified for the job of head coach here to begin with, and his actions since his hiring have only served to reinforce that statement. It is increasingly clear that he does not know what to do, and the only reason he remains in the job is that the incompetent administration that hired him in the first place is still employed as well. Everyone outside of Morgan Center recognizes this situation as untenable, which makes it an open question if the people in charge can recognize it, either.

With that said, welcome to the Eye Test! This is our weekly deep dive article where we take a closer look at each game and break down how the team performed on an individual and team-wide level, giving us a season-long look at how the team is progressing. The Eye Test is divided into five categories, shown here with a quick breakdown of what is in each grade:

• Offense - Fairly simple, this is just the offensive players and how they played. Scheme and playcalling are mostly ignored here, instead focusing on individuals.

• Defense - Same thing as offense, but with the defensive players.

• Special Teams - The same thing as the previous two categories, but this tends to be more of a pass/fail section. Still, special teams are important and can win or lose you a game, so they get their section.

• Coaching - This gets into things like scheme, playcalling, roster management, and the like, separated into offense, defense, and overall.

• Trend - Sticking around this season, Trend is a general vibes measurement on whether the team is moving in a positive or negative direction.

A couple more bits of housekeeping before we get started (and I’m just copying this from last year; sue me). First, grades are up to my discretion and are completely arbitrary. I’m sure people will feel differently about certain things, and I encourage you to head into the comments to tell me I’m a big stinky doo-doo head, but I’m just putting it out there now so that people know what’s going on. Second, the detail in the write-ups will vary from time to time, mostly in the first few sections, for the simple fact that I get bored writing the same thing over and over every week. Assume that if I don’t talk about a specific player or unit, they were either fine or did not play, and I want to talk more about the players and units that did impact the game the most.

Let’s get into this.

Offense

Quarterback: C

I think you could probably go lower here with the grade and be justified, but I’m trying to find whatever positives I can.

The book on Nico Iamaleava, coming out of Tennessee, was pretty straightforward. There was no doubting his arm talent and ability to make throws, but too often he would set the offense back with inaccuracy, especially on medium to deep throws. That is basically what we got in this game, as Iamaleava struggled with hitting the longer passes that would have opened things up for the offense. The opening drive in particular was characterized by a brutal overthrow of a streaking Mikey Matthews that could have gone for a touchdown (or at the very least a long gain based on where the Utah safety was) and a second overthrow towards Titus Mokiao-Atimalala that would have been caught if he were 10 feet tall. The fourth-down turnover was a good example of making the wrong decision, as he tried to force the ball to Matthews instead of taking a wide-open Jack Pedersen a few yards deeper.

That was the story of the night, as Iamaleava kept missing passes and making questionable decisions with the ball. In general, I felt he made good decisions when it came to running the ball, and the offense seemed to incorporate more designed runs to keep the defense honest, but there were moments where Nico had an open receiver and instead tucked the ball and ran, which may be a sign of not trusting his arm in that moment. In either case, he needs to be more accurate for this offense to have a chance.

Running Back: D+

Part of the blame here can go to the offensive line for not being great at run blocking, but Jalen Berger in particular is just not it. This is the healthiest he will be all season, and five carries for seven yards just won’t get it done, especially if Jaivian Thomas and Anthony Woods are going to be more effective. Woods in particular had a solid game, with his three carries for 13 yards acting as an appetizer to the three catches for 48 yards he had, including a nifty route for the lone UCLA touchdown.

Receivers: B-

Kwazi Gilmer had a drop and looked to tweak his ankle early, but that’s all I really have for a group that did the best with what they were given.

Offensive Line: D+

The positives: The right side of the line was generally fine, with Julian Armella spending most of the day looking like the best lineman of the group while Garrett DiGiorgio looked like a capable right tackle. On the other side, I thought Eugene Brooks looked pretty good for a redshirt freshman going up against an excellent defensive line. He’s someone you can definitely build around going forward.

The negatives: UCLA has two major problem areas at center and left tackle. Center is a pretty obvious problem, as Sam Yoon has been locked in a position battle with Oluwafunto Akinshilo throughout the preseason, and if your incumbent starter is having issues beating out a guy who hasn’t seen the field in four years, that’s probably not a good sign. Yoon was routinely blown up by Utah defenders, and not with anything tricky - these were linebackers beating Yoon with a bull rush, which should not be happening in any situation. Courtland Ford reminded everyone why he was no longer playing at Southern Cal, as he was consistently beaten by faster edge defenders and did not seem to have the cardio to play an entire game. Like with Yoon, Ford was locked in a battle with Reuben Unije in the preseason, and I would not be surprised to see changes if this level of play continues.

Overall: D

At the end of the day, UCLA only put up 220 total yards, and unlike last year, I can’t say this was the fault of a mediocre system. Tino Sunseri’s offense (which I’ll talk about more later) did a good job of scheming successful plays; UCLA’s failures on offense were entirely execution-based. Given the failings of the defense, this side of the ball cannot afford this level of play if UCLA is going to have a chance to win some games.

Defense

Run Defense: F-

Pass Defense: D-

Overall: F

Pour one out for Roderick Pleasant, the one player on the defense you can unequivocally state had a solid game.

The rest of this was a nightmare, starting with the defensive line. The interior was supposed to be the brightest spot coming into the season, with two returning starters in Gary Smith Jr. and Keanu Williams, who have both played at a high level in the past. Any success UCLA was going to find this season had to start with these two. And unfortunately for the Bruins, both Smith Jr. and Williams spent most of the day getting blown off the ball by the much-better Utah offensive line. Not an ideal start, but I’m sure if the defensive ends played well, this would wash out.

The defensive ends did not play well. In fact, this easily looks like UCLA’s worst position on defense. I’m not sure what the biggest problem is with this group. Athleticism is one problem; this group is exceptionally slow in a way that limits what they can do in trying to get to the quarterback. The group also failed to show any semblance of football understanding, as they repeatedly failed to set the edge against a running quarterback. My favorite part was watching Jacob Busic being continually used as a spy, something that I missed during the game (likely because it is so stupid that why would I even consider it an option). The defensive staff keeps trying to make Busic work on the field, and it has never paid off.

The linebackers…well, they ended up with a lot of tackles, but they were continually out of position and struggled with tackling. Ditto the secondary (outside of Pleasant). Honestly, if UCLA just tackled anywhere near the level that they did last year, this game likely still ends up as a loss, but nowhere near as lopsided as it ended up. It makes you question what this coaching staff did all offseason, from failing to bring in better talent to replace what they lost to actually working on tackling before the season.

But then again, I guess the coaching staff was too busy making sure the media couldn’t watch practices to do anything to fix this.

Special Teams

Overall: B+

I’m deemphasizing Special Teams in the final grade this year, mostly because I don’t think it will impact the overall game as much as it could. Which isn’t to say UCLA was bad here; if anything, the specialists were a shining beacon of competency amid a sea of failure. Mateen Bhaghani nailed his one field goal of note from 46 yards, and Will Karroll was perfectly adequate on his punts, averaging 42.5 yards on his four punts and getting enough hang time that none were returned.

Coaching

Offensive Gameplan: B

This was our first real look at Tino Sunseri’s offensive system, and I have to say that things looked pretty good!

There’s a lot to like here, starting with all of the presnap motion. The general idea of having motion before the snap is to get an idea of how the defense is going to attack. If a linebacker or safety mirrors the offensive player, you have a pretty good shot at going against man coverage, while a defense that passes the motioning player off is more likely to be playing some form of zone coverage. Sunseri also differed from his predecessor in his ability to send in plays early enough for the offense to line up and take advantage of that presnap motion to set up the best play possible for the offense.

Looking at the run game, there was plenty of counter, which makes sense since that’s the trendy play at the moment from offensive coordinators. Interestingly enough, there’s also a decent amount of QB-designed runs baked into the system. I don’t mean QB scrambles, either; there were more than a few cases where Nico kept the ball and followed his running back as a pseudo lead blocker. Personally, I’m not sure how smart that strategy is over the entire season, given the offensive line issues, but it does speak to some intriguing concepts in the future should UCLA move was from the Iamaleava family towards a sturdier dual-threat quarterback (ironically, like a Devon Dampier on Utah).

Finally, I was pleasantly surprised by the route concepts on display. One of the hallmarks of the Chip Kelly era was a conceptually strong running game and route trees that could conservatively be described as “drawn on a napkin while shrugging”. Here, Sunseri has drawn up routes that actually get people open, and there are multiple options for the quarterback to go through. I was thoroughly impressed with how often wide receivers were able to run open simply because they were schemed to do so; I could fill this article with clips of this happening, but I’m particularly fond of Nico’s first completion, where Matthews was freed up thanks to running an under route behind a streaking Mokiao-Atimalala, leading to an easy 15 yards.

There’s a lot of potential for this offense as the players get more comfortable with it and each other. It does require a good amount of execution to get humming, but I’m cautiously optimistic here.

Defensive Playcalling: F

Enough positive talk, let’s get down to brass tacks.

I think the Busic spying debacle speaks to a larger issue with this week’s game plan, in that it does not appear the defensive staff understood what their own personnel could do or what the opponent wanted to do. I know Foster and staff closed practices in an attempt to hide information from their opponent, but that doesn’t mean you have to hide it from yourself. Anyone who has paid attention the past few years would have told you that Busic did not have the skill set to make for an effective QB spy, just as they could have told you the defensive ends were going to be a problem and that the team needed to be proactive on defense to try and get stops rather than playing passive and hoping the opponent would make a mistake. Utah made one mistake all night, when they decided to try throwing deep bombs just for the hell of it and were forced to punt.

The second point is that it seemed the defense was unaware of what Utah wanted to do offensively, which is its own problem because we have plenty of footage on what that looks like. Dampier and his OC Jason Beck were both at New Mexico last year, and the offense Utah was running in this game was not too dissimilar from what the Lobos were doing last year, except for trading out New Mexico’s below-average offensive line with the top-end group that the Utes possess. I’m not sure why UCLA kept playing nickel defense against a team that wanted to run it down their throat so much; the only thought I have here is that they saw Utah lining up with four receivers and thought they had to match, too afraid of Dampier as a passer (where he isn’t particularly great) that they willingly sacrificed the run defense in the process.

Which is bizarre! If Dampier beat UCLA with his arm, then tip your hat and move on, but that’s not his game. Utah only attempted three passes over 15 yards and hit on just one of them, and Dampier threw more passes at or behind the line of scrimmage (10) than he did in the mid-range of 5-14 yards downfield (nine). But instead of challenging Dampier through the air, UCLA tried to shut that down, and Utah was more than happy to run the ball down their throats in response, to the tune of 286 yards on 54 carries, averaging 5.3 YPC.

The silver lining here is that Ikaika Malloe has a track record over the past year of setting his players up for success, so you have to hope this is as bad as it gets defensively. I personally don’t think UCLA has the horses on defense to greatly improve, which means Malloe has to figure out how to mitigate the weaknesses as much as possible. My suggestion? Try gambling more. Vegas is as good a place as any to start.

Overall: F

If you’re talking just in-game stuff, I thought Foster actually grew a bit from last year. He was much more aggressive with his fourth down calls, showing that maybe he took an analytics course this offseason where someone yelled at him about going for it on 4th and short for a few hours.

But you can’t separate the small victories from the bigger story, which is that UCLA looked wholly unprepared for this game. The tackling issues by themselves speak to fundamental problems with how the team practices, but you could throw in all of the player misevaluations and schematic breakdowns as well. From an outside observer, the coaching staff seems to have spent more time worrying about limiting media access to practice than they did actually practicing, which is never a good sign. It would be one thing for UCLA do everything they did this offseason to lose a competitive game, but when you look like an FCS team getting bodybagged for money, something’s gotta give.

Trend

Trending: Down

Before kickoff, UCLA ran a series of hype videos. One of them was the typical “season trailer” stuff that teams run, talking about all the work they put in during the offseason, but the one they played right before kickoff caught my eye. In a video narrated by former Bruin star Eric Kendricks, the program made a big deal talking about how “nobody believes in us” while showing shots of various preseason articles discussing the team. The video continued with Kendricks saying the team was rising after last season and they were going to prove all the doubters wrong.

Then the ball was kicked off and UCLA got its ass handed to it. Score one for the doubters, I guess.

The book is out on the Deshaun Foster era. An attendance number of 35,000 speaks to the dwindling support he enjoys, and I can’t imagine it will get better after this debacle. The program is DOA, and needs a complete reset from the top down.

Final Composite

Offense grade: D (1.0)

Defense grade: F (0.0)

Special Teams grade: B+ (3.3)

Coaching grade: F (0.0)

Trending: Down

Final grade for Utah Utes: D- (0.6)

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Buckle up, folks. This could be a long season.

Go Bruins.

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