The Eye Test: UCLA Hits New Lows Against Indiana

I'm so excited to grade this team for an entire year!

I’m fairly certain everyone in this picture is trying to figure out what to do on offense at the same time. (Photo credit: uclabruins.com)

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One of the fun things about the eye test is getting to look back at what I wrote previously and see if any changes were made. During the last Eye Test, I ended with the following statement:

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”.

So much for that.

UCLA managed to come out of a bye week looking even worse than they did during the Hawai’i game. There was no cohesive plan on offense, while the defense was shown to be not nearly as good as initially believed. Special teams kept making mistakes, the coaching staff made conservative decisions when they should have been trying to win, and nothing about the game instills any sort of confidence in anyone with decision-making power regarding UCLA football.

I said this initially when the hire was made, but it bears repeating now: none of this is Deshaun Foster’s fault. He inherited a roster that was already going to be depleted and did not get the typical time in the offseason that a new coach would get to try and change his personnel for the new season. He inherited a poor NIL operation and was never going to get the long leash that a new coach would have gotten thanks to his ties to the previous failed regime and his lack of credentials compared to every other name on the list. He was forced by a cheap AD into poor choices on his coaching staff and does not have a single veteran head coach among the group that is able to offer advice. None of this is good or even fair, and right now, it seems he is closer to going down as the coach with the worst W-L record in UCLA history than a success story.

But that’s a conversation for a different day. Right now, we need to do an autopsy of this debacle.

Offense

Overall: F

I’ll make it clear: this offense lacks talent in the worst way.

The offensive line is the biggest culprit in the problems personnel-wise. They can’t block effectively. The Hawai’i game appears to be a false positive in regards to pass blocking because Garbers was constantly under pressure from the pretty standard rush packages that the Hoosiers were throwing at him. Garbers was sacked twice and had two more QB hurries, and that doesn’t include the multiple sacks that were waved off for some of the softest roughing the passer penalties I’ve seen in a while (in fact, part of me feels the refs felt sorry for Garbers and threw the flag just to protect him a bit). They still can’t run block effectively, which is a problem given how much this offense wants to slow things down and stay on schedule. Worst of all, they look way too heavy, a sign that the new offensive coaching staff wanted the line to get bigger, which is what happened, but simply added mass without adding quality muscle.

I had an article I was going to write last week about the transfer portal and what positions you should focus on there, but I shelved it for later in the season to get more data. That said, I feel pretty confident in my assessment that you can’t go heavy on offensive line transfers and instead need to build that organically through high school recruiting and development. There’s too many new parts on the line and no cohesion among them, which is part of the problem.

Bless Ethan Garbers for what he is trying to do, but there is a reason last year’s coaching staff spent so long trying to make Dante Moore work, and that’s a recognition that Garbers is limited as a quarterback. He doesn’t have an arm that can accurately deliver balls to all levels of the field, and he lacks the top-end athleticism to make up for that. This isn’t disqualifying as a quarterback, but it means you have to account for what Garbers can and can’t do and adjust your offense accordingly. Chip Kelly at least figured that out, asking Garbers to make fewer deep passes and focus more on protecting the ball and keeping the offense on track. Through two games, it is unclear if Eric Bieniemy understands that Garbers is not Patrick Mahomes because he keeps asking him to do all the things that Mahomes does while playing behind a worse offensive line. Garbers is trying his best, but it is a recipe for disaster and leads to mistakes like the interception that Garbers threw into double coverage while trying to make a play.

TJ Harden is struggling without a competent offensive line and isn’t breaking tackles with any sort of regularity. The wide receivers are not very good, or at the very least are running routes that make them look terrible. None of this is good.

Defense

Overall: D

Unlike with the offense, where there are a lot of problems all over, the defensive problems are pretty easy to diagnose: there’s a lack of talent on the defensive line, and that is cascading to other parts of the defense.

The problem is something of a throwback to the early Chip Kelly defenses; UCLA needs a defensive line that can generate pressure on the quarterback from the base alignments, and when it cannot get any pressure and has to send extra bodies on a consistent basis, then the whole defense is in trouble because the secondary is flawed. When the defensive front can generate pressure, the secondary is able to hold up its end. UCLA has Jay Toia, and he’s very good, but outside of him the Bruins only have Keanu Williams who can play at a P4 level. The rest of the defensive line, especially at the defensive end, is lacking in talent, and it creates major problems because the coaching staff is forced to play other people out of position or compromise the defensive integrity to get anything done. It should have set off more warning bells in my head when Oluwafemi Oladejo was getting consistent reps as a rush linebacker because it takes him away from his more natural position just to try and solve the problem. UCLA failed the past few years to build any sort of playable depth at defensive end behind Laiatu Latu and the Murphy twins, and now they’re paying the price.

The rest of the problems fall into place from there. Kurtis Rourke is a fine quarterback, and if you give him all day to throw and never once pressure him in any meaningful way, he will pick apart your secondary. That’s exactly what happened here, as Rourke went 25-33 for 307 yards and four touchdowns. Third downs were especially brutal, with the Hoosiers converting nine of their 12 third downs on the day and Rourke averaging a ridiculous 14.2 yards per completion on third down (of which there were nine of these catches for seven conversions). UCLA would send extra guys, but Indiana scouted out the UCLA defense and had an answer every time.

What saves this grade from being a disaster is that the offense put it in some really bad positions at times, but it’s hard that this was a good performance. Rather, it was a very eye-opening performance.

Special Teams

Overall: D+

Marteen Bhaghani went 2-3 on kicks and looks like a solid if unspectacular college kicker. Considering what UCLA was getting from this spot last year, it appears to be the only position that has seen improvement since last year. Punting was fine as well.

No, what gets the grade so low here is kickoff returns. Specifically, why on earth is Keegan Jones running the ball out of the end zone in the first place? I can understand if the coaching staff feels that the offense is so bad that they need to take every home run shot they can, but if that’s the case they have to find a better returner than Jones, who has never excelled in that spot and consistently shows poor judgment on which lanes to take. Jones had four kickoff returns in this game, none of which went longer than 22 yards, which meant UCLA started four different drives with the prospects of having to drive a longer distance than if Jones had simply fair caught the ball and taken it at the 25. Special teams always seems to be a good canary for whether a football team is focused on details, and this one does not seem to be the case at the moment.

Coaching

Offensive Gameplan: F

If you want the most emblematic play for the offense, it was the very first one of the game, where Garbers and Harden had a miscommunication on an RPO and fumbled the ball immediately back to Indiana. The execution of the play was suspect at best, but if your players are screwing up that badly on the first play of the game, a play that has been practiced repeatedly thanks to scripting, then that’s a coaching failure.

I’m already out on the Eric Bieniemy offense at UCLA. It does not look like an offense that can adapt itself to personnel and the needs of the college game. The offensive line has a few new bodies but it looks like it has totally regressed from last year. Ethan Garbers looks much worse than he did last year, as does TJ Harden. The receivers technically exist, but they continually end up all running routes into the same area. I do not know if this is a complexity issue or just a functionality one (Bieniemy is insistent that the offense is not too complex for the players, so we’ll see) but at some point something here needs to shift, and in a hurry.

Defensive Gameplan: D-

Again, a lot of the defensive issues can be boiled down to lacking the horses that they had in previous seasons, but now it’s on the coaching staff to try and generate a pass rush in the aggregate. Unlike the offensive staff, this group of coaches has been here for the past few years, so they should be aware of what the talent level on the defense is and what they need to do to scheme for success. Indiana was the first real test on that front and it was an almost-complete failure, so we’ll see if the staff has a better handle on how to make things work in the coming weeks or if the success of the past year really was a combination of D’Anton Lynn and Laiatu Latu.

Overall: F

I try not to get macro in the Eye Tests but through two games, I’m willing to make a statement:

Folks, this is not going to work.

Deshaun Foster can give as many impassioned speeches upon hiring as he wants, but the truth of the matter is that no serious program would have given him the position he’s in, simply because he has not proven himself at a higher level. He lacks the schematic acumen that a proven coordinator would possess, and he doesn’t have the track record as an exceptional recruiter to overcome that (oh, just as a check-in, the Bruins currently rank 38th nationally in recruiting, which is below the average class ranking of 30th that known bad recruiter Chip Kelly brought in during his tenure. I can’t imagine things get better given the results on the field). And when you combine that with a staff assembled on the cheap (contracts retained from the previous staff plus coaches who were out of work and could be gotten for cheap) you end up with the situation you have now; all that remains is the autopsy of why the program is dead.

Foster was sold to the fanbase by the administration as a continuity hire, but what continuity was there to hold onto? The vast majority of the fanbase was fed up with the Chip Kelly era, so trying to sell “Chip Kelly, but worse” seems like a recipe for disaster. I think the fanbase would have happily sat through a loss like this with a new coach who had zero ties to the previous regime, because everyone involved could handwave the results away by saying “Yeah, the last guy left the cupboard bare, we’re going to restock it”. Foster can’t claim that, because he worked for the last guy! Half of the staff was here the past year! This kind of result is so bad that it even makes Chip Kelly look better by comparison because he was able to win games with a roster that looks this terrible.

I rarely listen to the coaching interviews after games or during the week, but I popped in Foster’s postgame presser to see how he would react to his first major roadblock. After listening to it, the one word that ran through my head was Dorrellian. Foster looked like he had no idea what had just happened; worse, he blamed the failures on the execution of the players as to why things went the way they did (never mind that Foster is only in this position because the players stuck up for him!). Once you go down the road of blaming the players as the coach, it’s hard to come back from, and I think that has born itself out over this past week as UCLA has reportedly had a series of low-energy practices (also always another good sign: when the players keep saying “yeah the energy was low again today, we need to do better” and the head coach says “the energy was where I needed it to be”).

I’ll give some credit to Eric Bieniemy here for being the only coach saying that he has to do a better job of helping the players succeed. Didn’t want to seem unfair here.

In the micro, Foster and his staff got thoroughly outcoached. Curt Cignetti is exactly the kind of coach you want to hire: a proven winner at multiple spots who works diligently to out scheme you, and then doesn’t outthink things when he finds an advantage. On offense, Indiana continuously attacked UCLA over the top where they were weak. On defense, the Hoosiers continually sent multiple blitzes, assuming UCLA’s offensive line would not hold up and there would be no counterplay. Both decisions worked flawlessly, and Indiana did not deviate from these strategies until the game was late and well in hand. It wasn’t like they needed to - at no point did UCLA offer up any counter-strategy - but they did not try and get cute and react to an action that did not take place.

I have a feeling this will not be the first time that UCLA will get out-coached this year, and if you’re trying to find a positive from this garbage fire of a game, the best you’re hoping for is that this is an abberation. Considering everything I’ve seen during and since the game, I would not bet on that being the case, but your mileage may vary.

Trend

Trending: Down

If the first game was a downward trend, then what does that make the worst home loss since the 1930s?

In all seriousness, when I came up with this new category, I assumed UCLA would have an up-and-down season that would be easy to track. Now? I’m not sure this category will change much. We’ll see!

Final Composite

Offense grade: F (0.0)

Defense grade: D (1.0)

Special Teams grade: D+ (1.3)

Coaching grade: F (0.0)

Trending: Down

Final grade for Indiana Hoosiers: F (0.6)

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

Hawai’i Rainbow Warriors: C (1.9)

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Yeah, that sucked, and might be the first pure F I’ve ever given out for an Eye Test. Impressive stuff from the Deshaun Foster era! I can’t wait to see what else Martin Jarmond has cooked up to justify his job in the coming weeks!

Anyway, I’m off to New Orleans, because even if this team is a trainwreck that might not win another game this year, it’s hard to pass up a trip to Death Valley. Too bad this team wasn’t good enough to justify a night game, but I’ll settle for some wonderful tailgate food courtesy of the good folks of LSU.

Go Bruins.

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