The 2022 UCLA Football Preview Part 3: Taking Advantage of an Easy Schedule

The Bruins should put up a lot of wins this year. That doesn't necessarily mean they will be a great team.

Dorian Thompson-Robinson is looking for bigger things in 2022. (Photo Credit: Eric Hurd/uclabruins.com)

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Welcome to Part 3 of our 2022 UCLA Bruins football season preview. We’ve taken a look at the offense, defense, and special teams, so now we’re turning towards the schedule and making a guess as to what UCLA could accomplish this season.

This is an interesting prediction article to write for a host of reasons. For example, this may be the easiest schedule UCLA has faced in a quarter of a century. There is no big non-conference game against a Power 5 opponent; there’s not even a game against a high-end Group of Five team like UCLA has had in the past. Instead, the Bruins have a cakewalk to open the season, with their toughest matchup being against an upper-tier team from the Sun Belt. The conference schedule is not much tougher, in part because the Pac-12 is not very good, and UCLA’s two toughest games against Utah and Southern Cal will take place at home. This is the kind of schedule that a good UCLA team could make a lot of noise with, but would also cause a neutral observer to recognize that there is not a lot of heft behind the gaudy win totals.

That also makes predicting what the future of UCLA football looks like after the season tough. UCLA is in possession of a highly-desirable job as it prepares for the jump to the Big Ten, but the schedule could make it difficult to justify a change in leadership. If you’re someone hoping for a change, the good news is that national media has clued in to how easy this schedule is and are predicting high win totals - both Jon Wilner at the Mercury News and Stewart Mandel at the Athletic have UCLA pegged at 9-3, and the general consensus is that UCLA is the 4th best team in the conference behind Utah, Southern Cal, and Oregon. 4th best is fine, but that’s also about where UCLA was last year and two of the teams picked above them have new head coaches. That’s less a sign of upward mobility and more a sign of stalling out right when the program seems poised to take a downturn.

And maybe that’s the biggest problem with writing this prediction article: no one really knows what this team could look like or what their ceiling is. There are new players on both sides of the ball with a heavy emphasis on transfers that can contribute immediately. Throw in an entirely new coaching staff on defense and you get a program that should have a baseline of competency but no real understanding of what the ceiling could be. Predictions are guesses at best but this is closer to throwing darts at a wall and hoping it all makes sense.

Oh, and I have a sterling prediction record to maintain, so no pressure.

With all that said, let’s get into the game predictions. As usual, I reserve the right to write as much or as little as I want about a given game. Case in point:

Week One: vs Bowling Green

It is a mystery how Scot Loeffler has not been fired yet, but it’s definitely happening after this season. I would hesitate to read too much into a UCLA that struggles coming out of the gate, but if the final score is under 21 points, that might be a huge red flag. 1-0.

Week Two: vs Alabama State

You’re coming to this game to watch the Alabama State marching band. 2-0.

Week Three: vs South Alabama

Here is where things get interesting. South Alabama is a solid Sun Belt team that will be competing for a division crown this year. Their location means they have access to a decent amount of talent, unlike scheduling a mid-tier Mountain West team. Again, I think UCLA should win this game, but this should be an early measuring stick game. If the Bruins struggle, that would not bode well for the rest of the year. 3-0.

Week Four: @ Colorado

I’m fascinated by Colorado and what they plan to do in the future. To be gentle to a former Bruin, Karl Dorrell is not long for that job, but they really cannot afford to fire him this season, which means he’s likely safe unless things get drastically worse. That 2020 looks more and more like a fluke the more time passes. This is UCLA’s first road game so things could get squirrely for a bit, but again UCLA should win this one handily. 4-0.

Week Five: vs Washington

Here’s the first true swing game of the season. UCLA and Washington have similar talent levels, which led to a frustrating game last year where the Bruins had a clear coaching advantage but could not break away from the Huskies on the road, ultimately winning 24-17. Washington has a clear coaching upgrade after bringing in a head coach in Kalen DeBoer who knows how to win as an underdog in the Rose Bowl (he did it just last year while he was at Fresno State).

The big question will be what kind of shape will Washington be in at this point; they host a good Michigan State team and then a probably-bad-but-still-physical Stanford the week after before traveling for a Friday night game. Washington is not particularly deep at many key positions. So, this should all play well for the Bruins. But the opposite question will be “What mental space will UCLA be in?”. A win here would set them up for a likely matchup with Utah with both teams being undefeated. So, the Bruins could be caught looking ahead. I think UCLA ultimately wins, but there’s enough here to be intriguing. 5-0.

Week Six: vs Utah

And now the actual test.

Utah will be the best team in the conference this year. Their offense is returning their major contributors from a team that went blow-for-blow with Ohio State in last year’s Rose Bowl, and while the defense is rebuilding a bit, it’s hard to argue against Kyle Whittingham’s track record. Recent history is not kind to the Bruins in this matchup. The last time UCLA beat Utah was in 2015, and the average score in this matchup since Chip Kelly took over is 45-12. UCLA has a chance here, if only because Utah might get caught looking ahead to their probable Top 10 matchup with Southern Cal the following week, but Whittingham seemingly loves taking every opportunity to bury the Bruins, and I don’t think that necessarily changes this year. 5-1.

Week Seven: Bye Week

Honestly, strong bye week placement, as the Bruins will need some time to regroup after the probable beatdown they’ll have suffered in the previous week.

Week Eight: @ Oregon

What a fascinating game for the second swing game of the schedule. It’s hard to make sense of what Oregon will really be this year. They have a new head coach in Dan Lanning who should improve the Ducks’ defense, but the offense was already going to be a bit of a question mark since Joe Moorhead just left to become the new head coach at Akron. The Ducks are going to ride with the Bo Nix experience after bringing him in from Auburn, which increases the chaos factor by 100.

But all that said, Oregon is still going to be the more talented team here, and as we’ve seen in this matchup the previous two years, talent can win out if the coaching is even enough. Especially with this being on the road, I think UCLA ends up dropping its second game of the year. 5-2.

Week Nine: vs Stanford

Stanford is bad right now, which means I am now irrationally afraid of this game. Gonna pencil it as a get-right win, but I’m not going to feel good about it. 6-2.

Week Ten: @ Arizona State

Apropos of nothing, here are some quotes from anonymous coaches given to Athlon Sports regarding the situation at Arizona State:

"This is the biggest dumpster fire in college football. It is absolutely mind blowing that Herm [Edwards] is still employed, at least in the mind of the college coaching community. Everyone knows it's a ticking time bomb, but no one knows if it's going off in a month or a year from now. They look like a mid-level SEC program when they get off the bus, and you start to see what they've been recruiting. Then you finish the game, and it's like playing a MWC team. They're wildly inconsistent, they turn the ball over, they make mental errors, it's all stuff that screams no stability. We've played them when they're locked in and physical, and we've played them when they're just not interested in being there."

"It's embarrassing he still has a job when some of those assistants are unemployed and bearing the brunt of things he directed."

"This program has the best chance of a total implosion midseason because there's no consistency anywhere: not in the coaches, the head coach, or the roster. It's a waste. This program is always good on paper but fails to every really win consistently, and this another example of it."

Anyway, Arizona State should be in full-on implosion mode at this point, and if the Bruins struggle to win this game, you can feel free to start writing the obituary on Chip Kelly’s tenure. 7-2.

Week Eleven: vs Arizona

An interesting game, to be sure. There’s a lot of UCLA ties on this coaching staff, with two former interim head coaches in Jedd Fisch and DeWayne Walker, and three assistants in Jimmie Dougherty, Johnny Nansen, and Jason Kaufusi who were on Chip Kelly’s staff at various points. Familiarity breeds contempt, and you can bet Fisch will have Arizona fired up for this game. But they’re missing so much talent still that this should not be exceptionally close. 8-2.

Week Twelve: vs Southern Cal

Last year I swerved and chose the Bruins to upset Southern Cal. Little did I know that by the time that game would roll around, the Trojans would have imploded, fired their coach, and been on their third quarterback of the season. The resulting 62-33 beatdown was not much of an upset and more of a preordained ending.

That said, I can’t make that call this year. I think the Southern Cal is getting overhyped to a degree, but Lincoln Riley is still a really good coach who should have no problem beating up on a bad conference for a few years, and they did an excellent job of bringing in a ton of talented transfers to restock the roster (for all the people crowing about Chip Kelly’s success in the transfer portal, Riley managed to eat his lunch by bringing over the best quarterback transfer AND the defending Biletnikoff winner to build the offense around). If this game was early in the year, I think UCLA’s general continuity would give them a good chance to win the game, but that’s not how the Crosstown Rivalry works. Still a rivalry game, so there’s still a chance at weird things happening, but I don’t have the Bruins winning this game at the moment. 8-3.

Week Thirteen: @ UC Berkeley

The most fascinating non-move of the offseason was Justin Wilcox not pursuing the Oregon job which likely could have been his, choosing instead to return to the dumpster fire that is UC Berkeley football. This team will be bad, which only serves to reinforce the UC Regents’ belief that they should drop down to DIII where they belong. 9-3.

Final results: 9-3 record, with either a trip to the Las Vegas Bowl or Sun Bowl (I can’t imagine the Holiday Bowl is that excited about the opportunity of bringing the Bruins back after last year’s fiasco). No one is truly happy, but everyone agrees to wait things out one more season.

Hope you enjoyed the season previews!

Go Bruins!

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