The Eye Test: An Inauspicious Start to the Deshaun Foster Era Ends in Comeback Victory Over Hawai'i
A win is a win, but not all wins are created equal.
Welcome to the Eye Test! The Eye Test is our way of breaking down each UCLA football game to determine how the team performed on an individual and team-wide level and gauge how the team is progressing throughout the season. 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 - New this year, Trend is a way to measure whether the team is trending in a positive or negative direction. Given that this year is very much a table-setting year for future seasons under Coach Foster, it is important to gauge whether the team improves as the season progresses.
A couple more bits of housekeeping before we get started. 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.
Also, these will probably come out later in the week than they have the past few years. Blame me for having three new classes to prep for this year, sorry.
Now, as for last Saturday's game, well, I did warn you this would be a rough year, right?
Joe talked about not overreacting to the results of one game in the Sunday Morning Quarterback, and while I think that is the correct way to go about your life, that doesn’t mean we cannot look at what took place last Saturday as an aberration. If anything, the game served to confirm some priors I had heading into the season, from the quality and depth of the roster to what quality of coaching we were going to get, especially on offense. I think there were some bright spots, to be sure, but on rewatch the warts stand out and make me wary of what may happen the rest of the way. It’s good to get a win, to be sure, but that doesn’t mean we can be less critical. So let’s get into it.
Offense
Quarterback: C-
On rewatch, I do think Ethan Garbers comes off looking a bit better than he initially did on Saturday, mostly because I think some of his problems had to do with play design rather than his decision-making. Through one game, it seems clear that offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy wants to push the ball downfield through the air, which is fine except you have to give the quarterback options at multiple levels of the field, and too often the receivers seemed to all run routes in the same general direction. Given what Garbers limitations are as a passer (he is very accurate in the short to medium range and does not possess the arm strength to be a consistent deep threat), this seems like poor game-planning by the coaching staff, but we’ll get to that later.
That said, in the first half Garbers was abysmal and was trying to lose the game on his own. Garbers went 6-19 for 69 (nice) yards and two interceptions in that first half, with the second interception in particular standing out as an incredibly poor decision from a quarterback who should know better. I think his recognition of the pressure that Hawai’i was sending his way in the first half was poor as well and contributed to his decisions to run and scramble more in the second half. Second half Garbers was good enough to win the game, but he did spend a ton of time making the hole as deep as possible.
Running Back: D-
Putting aside that the offensive line could not run block at all, this was not a great look from the running backs, particularly TJ Harden. Harden was hit in the backfield constantly, true, but he was never able to break through tackles to make something out of nothing, which was something he showed signs of being able to do last year. Keegan Jones was slightly better, able to wiggle his way to some yards, but overall this was abysmal stuff from a group that was seen as a strength heading into the season.
Receivers: B
It was fine. I’m fascinated by Logan Loya getting leaped in the rotation by Rico Flores, especially considering Loya was the most consistent safety valve for Garbers last year, but Flores did add a nice element to the offense by providing a deep threat, and he finished tied for the most targets on the team. J. Michael Sturdivant had an ok opening game, only catching three of his eight targets, but he wasn’t given much of a chance on many of the throws so hard to cast blame here. I think a lot of the blame for the performance can be divided between Garbers being erratic and an offensive philosophy that abandoned the underneath game in favor of longer-developing routes, so hopefully, that adjusts going forward.
Offensive Line: D-
You can put whatever caveats you want on this performance, especially the fact that Garrett DiGiorgio was out and a walk-on in Niki Prongos was forced to start. I’m not here to do any of that; instead, I’m here to grade what was put in front of me. And what was put in front of me was mostly garbage.
Let’s just focus on the run blocking, which was abysmal no matter how you look at it. There was always going to be a bit of an adjustment in style, as Chip Kelly utilized a lot of zone blocking and pulling actions to create leverage in the run game, while the early returns on the Eric Bieniemy system is that there will be more one-on-one or double teams to try and generate holes instead. It’s a choice at the college level, to be sure, but I don’t think UCLA has the personnel to consistently win those kinds of battles. Again, hard to say how much of this is a stylistic choice to match the offensive system (more on that in a moment) or how much of this is by necessity given that this is an offensive line with a lot of new parts (new starters at left tackle and right guard, along with a position move to center), but the early results were not good. If the UCLA offensive line could not generate anything resembling a good push against a middling Mountain West team, then it is hard to be confident about them against any of the stouter Big Ten teams they will face this year. The hope will have to be that this group develops as the season progresses.
Pass protection was generally OK, and was the only thing keeping this from being a complete failure by the offensive line. There were plenty of breakdowns, and again you’d like to see a UCLA offensive line be able to dominate against an inferior opponent, but Ethan Garbers was generally given enough time to get through his reads on offense. Given that the offensive system appears to be of the pass-to-run variety, that’s at least a good starting point.
Overall: D+
Honestly, if one of the sore points (Garbers, running backs, offensive line) played better, this game is not nearly as close and UCLA fans aren’t freaking out nearly as much. Like, if Garbers is simply more accurate in the first half, that would take a ton of pressure off of other aspects of the team, or if the running backs were better about finding space and breaking tackles to get positive yardage, you could handwave the offensive line play away as a simple blip that can be corrected.
But, combined with the playcalling you end up with a recipe for disaster. UCLA played Hawai’i even on offense, which is a disaster no matter how you slice it, and is something that has to be corrected going forward if UCLA is to have any shot at even a decent season.
Defense
Pass Defense: B
The biggest question I had about the defense going into this season was what the plan was going to be for getting after the quarterback. The Bruins lost Laiatu Latu and the Murphy twins in the offseason, which is a huge amount of production out the door, and did not appear to have a ready-made replacement ready for either end spot. Given the lack of top-end talent that the defensive staff could just roll out and assume will make havoc on their own, it was going to be interesting to see how they generated pressure. I assumed that the team would start sending pressure from all over in an attempt to fix that situation and that mostly proved to be the case, with solid results.
I’ll save some of the tactics talk for the coaching section but suffice to say that the new concept relied on the linebackers to do a lot of the heavy lifting, and they generally rose to the occasion. Kain Medrano and Oluwafemi Oladejo were flying around on the outside while Ale Kano was stout in the middle, and that strength resonated throughout the rest of the defense. Jay Toia was a monster in the middle, and the secondary, after some shaky early play, stepped up and limited the YAC that gets the run-and-shoot humming. Just a solid first effort in pass defense here.
Overall: A-
Overall, the defense passed their first test of the year, which was to see how far back they would fall given all the off-season turnover they experienced. You can generally excuse the touchdown given that the defense had already forced a punt on that same drive and it is hard to mentally get back when you think you’ve done your job, and one of the field goals was the result of field position, but the defense did a solid job of holding the Hawai’i offense in check. There were some shaky moments early on that had me a bit worried, but this group battled back and turned in a workmanlike performance given the circumstances.
Special Teams
Overall: D+
A grade only saved by UC Berkeley transfer Mateen Bhagani, who nailed all his field goals and kickoffs and should have those jobs moving forward. I guess this UCLA coaching felt that Blake Glessner deserved the first crack at things still despite, I don’t know, watching him all of last season and bringing in a transfer kicker because you had to watch him all of last season. You can’t blame him for missing the 52-yard attempt because he’s a college kicker and you really shouldn’t be playing for long field goals with them, but even on kickoffs, it was readily apparent that Bhagani should have been doing the role from the start.
Punting was an adventure as well. Chase Berry got the first two punts and would have had some of the worst punting numbers around had his second kick not taken some miraculous bounces to end up as a 62-yard kick and not the 25 yards where it initially landed. Brody Richter got the next two punts and while his first kick was not very good, his second was the only good punt of the day for the Bruins. This was not great at all.
I’m saving the fake punt for the coaching section because that was not the fault of the players, especially because there were only nine of them on the field.
Coaching
Offensive Gameplan: D
I’m kind of kicking myself a bit here because I decided against doing an in-depth dive into Eric Bieniemy as an offensive coach in the preseason, instead glossing over it with this section:
His past season with the Washington Commanders, however, stands as a stark contrast. Bieniemy did not have near the same caliber of player in Washington that he worked with in Kansas City - no one would mistake Sam Howell for Patrick Mahomes - but it was startling how disinterested Bieniemy seemed in adapting his offense to match his personnel. Washington had a decent rushing attack but instead chose to throw the ball an excessive amount, which was not ideal for a young quarterback and a suspect offensive line.
Imagine my surprise when UCLA went out there and tried to execute a playbook not dissimilar to what the Chiefs have run for years to suboptimal results! I’m not sure what is possessing Bieniemy to throw as much as he chose to and to throw medium to long as much as he is, but it does not read as a recipe for success in college.
In any case, UCLA is now running a version of the West Coast offense, which is very pass-to-run by utilizing horizontal routes to open things up in both the running game and the vertical passing game. Unfortunately, Bieniemy skipped over establishing the horizontal passing to try going deeper throughout the game, resulting in UCLA leaving a lot of easy yards on the field. Again, given the relative strengths of the personnel available (Garbers is more accurate on shorter throws, an offensive line does not have to block as long) you would think UCLA would be abusing these shorter routes, yet that is not what happened. It does not help that some of the play designs we did see felt uninspired, with multiple instances of the receivers all running to one spot on the field and becoming much easier to defend. Same with the running game which was propped up solely by the scrambling of Garbers, as the designed runs were too slow-developing to give anybody a chance.
I think the ultimate problem through one game is how similar this looked to what Bieniemy did in Washington last season. Away from Patrick Mahomes and the well-oiled Kansas City Chiefs machine for the first time in years, Bieniemy struggled mightily in adapting his playbook to his personnel, instead treating his offensive system as if it was player-agnostic. But if there’s any fanbase that is fully aware of how untrue that idea is, it might be UCLA fans. Consider how many failed offenses we’ve seen committed over the years without an understanding that personnel is lacking: while the Pistol will always stand out in this regard, I think the year of Kennedy Polamalu’s power football following four years of the N-zone spread will remain my favorite. Ethan Garbers is not Sam Howell who is not Patrick Mahomes; you have to adjust your playcalling to match your personnel, and the earliest returns on this offense are that Bieniemy still does not understand that concept. We’ll see if he adjusts going forward.
Defensive Gameplan: B+
On the flip side, I thought Ikaika Malloe passed his first real test as defensive coordinator with flying colors. The defense held Hawai’i to only 278 yards and 13 points, with a few of those gifted thanks to poor decisions by the offense and special teams. That is the kind of performance that can win you some football games if the offense figures things out.
I was curious to see how UCLA would generate pressure without having a first-round pick lining up on every snap, and it seems the answer that this coaching staff came up with is “just have your outstanding linebackers do everything.” It’s not a bad idea by any stretch. Medrano and Oladejo kept lining up as extra defensive ends and threatened to rush the quarterback on every play; sometimes they did, while other times they fell back into coverage. It was a smart play, taking advantage of the strongest unit on the defense to cover for one of the weakest parts. And on a development level, the play of Carson Schwesinger was exceptional, as the former unranked recruit had the second-most tackles on the team and played a good amount of snaps, giving the linebackers another solid option and allowing Medrano and Oladejo to essentially play defensive end on more than a few plays.
Adjustment-wise, it was smart to play Hawai’i with a shell over the top to keep the run-and-shoot in front of them (only allowing 90 YAC for a team that completed 25 passes is pretty solid), and in the second half, the defense adjusted by playing more man on the shorter routes, which cut that off pretty effectively. Hawai’i only managed 100 yards in the entire second half, a testament to how effective those adjustments were.
Overall: D+
Look, I get that it is Deshaun Foster’s first game in charge, but there were some worrying things in this one.
Let’s start with the biggest mistake, the fake punt. UCLA only had nine players on the field for the punt, which the players seemed to realize but the coaching staff did not. Eleven is greater than nine, which made the conversion a simple math game. However, the fact that UCLA was unprepared for a punt in the first place speaks to an organizational failure that falls squarely on Foster’s shoulders. He has to take on a CEO role during games and see the big picture, and if he fails to see that his punt return unit is not prepared, that’s not ideal. Again, Foster has never been this high up on the management depth chart, so it shouldn’t have been a huge surprise that he would make a mistake like this, but this mistake led to Hawai’i’s only touchdown of the game, and given the margins the rest of the team was operating on, it could have been the difference between a win and a loss.
I don’t think I can fault the fourth-down decisions that Foster kept making too much, as they were coming from a place of believing he had superior talent and was simply trying to minimize mistakes. Yes, they should have gone for it multiple times instead of punting or trying long field goals, but I at least understand the conservative mindset in this regard. This makes the decision to try and air it out at the end of the first half all the more baffling; UCLA had not shown any sort of consistency on offense in the first half and should have simply run out the clock with a few run plays so that it could regroup. Instead, the Bruins went with an ill-advised passing attempt that was predictably intercepted, gifting the Rainbow Warriors an amazing field position. It is only thanks to a great defensive effort that Hawai’i did not score a touchdown, but it only serves to highlight how poor the decision was. Foster claimed responsibility for everything in this paragraph, which is good accountability to be sure, but it is again something that needs to be cleaned up going forward.
Far be it from me to pay any attention to what is said in the pregame shows, but Rick Neuheisel stated that the first game of a coach’s tenure is the one he prepares for the most. Rick can back up that statement - his first game as UCLA head coach was the wild overtime home upset of then-ranked Tennessee (don’t look at what happened after that). So it is a bit disappointing that UCLA, especially the coaching staff on the offensive side of the ball, looked so unprepared for this game. The hope is that this was just a one-game blip and not a sign of things to come.
Trend
Trending: Down
Pretty easy first grade to give here. Even if you factor in a new coach, a host of new players on both sides of the ball, and the travel, this was not a great first outing for the team. This should have been an opponent that even an average UCLA team should have handled fairly convincingly. I am not saying the game could not be close, but rather that UCLA should have had control from the very beginning. At no point did that feel like the case on Saturday, and the fact that UCLA took its first lead of the day in the final minute stands out in this regard.
Deshaun Foster’s job this year is hard. I said it would be back in February when he was hired. And as I said in the season preview, wins and losses this year are secondary to showing competency and growth. But one of the goals for the year was Don’t Do Embarrassing Things, and UCLA putting on that level of performance on national broadcast television was embarrassing. Having that punt fiasco was embarrassing. Failing to control the game until the final minute was embarrassing. The new national perception of UCLA that I heard from the media was “Oh that team is going to be bad bad” and that’s going to be a hard thing for Foster to overcome on the recruiting trail.
This was a chance to make a positive first impression and they blew it, plain and simple.
Final Composite
Offense grade: D+ (1.3)
Defense grade: A- (3.7)
Special Teams grade: D+ (1.3)
Coaching grade: D+ (1.3)
Trending: Down
Final grade for Hawai’i Rainbow Warriors: C (1.9)
I’m unsurprised by that final grade, given the defense played exceptionally well. Sometimes you have that one kid in the group project who just carries everyone else to a passing grade.
If you’re looking for silver linings here, UCLA gets an early bye week to try and fix some things. This is an early test of the Foster regime to see if they can make improvements throughout the season. The next game is a winnable one against an Indiana team breaking in a new head coach, but that coach is a proven winner at multiple stops and will have had a few games to tune things up before this one. Again, none of the games this season can truly be considered “must win” but this one might be a “must show improvement”.
Go Bruins.
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Great evaluation, and some of the finer critiques are probably correctable, but the overall picture of talent and experience (players and coaches) is going to be tough to change this year.
Pretty much agree with Dimitri on the grades except a D+ would have been my assessment of the final grade--C seems far too generous when all the other grades were D's and trending down except the defense. More important, excellent analysis of the team's and coach's' actual performance. Looking again at the future schedule, would still be surprised with three wins. Chip doomed this season by leaving the cupboard bare.