UCLA Football Preview: Jedd Fisch Brought Most of His Arizona Staff to Washington
Only three of the Huskies' defensive coaches weren't with the Wildcats last season.
After making to the CFP Championship Game last season, Washington head coach Kalen DeBoer left for Alabama. In his place, the Huskies hired former Arizona head coach and former UCLA offensive coordinator Jedd Fisch.
Most of Fisch’s Wildcat staff chose to make the move with Fisch to Seattle. In fact, only three significant members of Fisch’s Washington staff weren’t with him last year in Tucson. Two of the three came from the New England Patriots staff. That would be defensive coordinator Steve Belichick, son of the former Patriots head coach, and safeties coach Vinnie Sunseri. The third is linebacker coach Robert Bala, who was Alabama’s linebackers coach last season.
Of course, Fisch significantly rebuilt the Arizona program in just three seasons. He took over a team which had won just nine games over the previous three seasons and none in 2020. In his first season, the team struggled, winning just once, but when the Wildcats beat UC Berkeley on November 6, it was the team’s first win since October 5, 2019 against Colorado, a span of more than two years.
In Fisch’s second season in Tucson, the Wildcats improved to 5-7, and last season, they improved again. This time, they finished 10-3 including a 38-24 win over Oklahoma in the Alamo Bowl.
This year hasn’t been a great one for the Huskies, but Year One of the Jedd Fisch era at UW has been much better than his first year at Arizona. So far, Washington is 5-5 this year. That includes losses to Penn State and Indiana, but it also includes losses to Iowa, Rutgers and Washington State. Obviously, Iowa and Rutgers are teams the Bruins have beaten recently. So, it stands to reason that Friday night’s game is certainly a winnable one, even if it is a road game.
Fisch’s offensive coordinator is Brennan Carroll. You will recall that Carroll is the oldest son of former Southern Cal and Seahawk head coach Pete Carroll. Given that Fisch is an offensive coach and Carroll was his offensive coordinator at Arizona, I would expect the Huskies to run a similar offense to what the Wildcats ran last season. Expect them to run a well-balanced offense, primarily with a single back in the backfield. So far, they have run the ball 48.7% of the time and thrown it 51.3%.
Defensively, the depth chart shows that Steve Belichick runs a 4-2-5 Nickel defense as the Huskies base defense. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that a defense run by a guy named Belichick is one of the best defenses in college football. That’s what the Huskies have. Washington allows the third fewest passing yards per game in the country with just 149.8 per game and they are allowing less than one passing touchdown per game. That stout pass defense has the Huskies ranked 19th in the nation in total defense.
If the Huskies’ defense has an Achilles heel, it has to be their rushing defense. They are only ranked 88th in the country in rushing defense. They are allowing 4.53 yards per rush and and average of 162.3 yards per game. This means that UCLA might just be able to build on last week’s strong rushing attack again this week as the Bruins continue to find their footing on the ground.
Special Teams
Junior Grady Gross will handle all of the placekicking duties for the Huskies. After making near 82% of his field goal attempts last season, Gross’ accuracy has slipped significantly this season. He’s only made 15 of 23 field goal attempts. He has also had two of his attempts blocked this season after only having one blocked last year. At the same time, Gross has made all 21 of his PAT tries.
Gross has seen the average length of his kickoffs drop this season as well. Last season, he averaged 62.5 yards per kickoff while he is averaging just 60.0 yards per kickoff this year. With Gross’ kickoff average dropping, you would expect to see some sort of a drop in the number of touchbacks opposing teams have had. That slip has been more significant than one might expect. Last year, Gross had 48 touchbacks on 101 kickoffs, but this year, he has only had 17 touchbacks on 51 kickoffs.
Junior Jack McAllister has handled all but one punt since he first came to Washington in 2022. McAllister has actually punted a little bit better this year, raising his punting average by almost three yards per punt from 41.7 yards to 44.5 yards. He also has his career long punt three weeks ago against Indiana when he booted one for 62 yards. With seven punts of more than 50 yards, he has already surpassed his total of punts greater than 50 yards from last season.
Sophomore wide receiver Denzel Boston has returned all of Washington’s punt returns this season. That said, the overall number has been just 10 punt returns this season. On those 10 punt returns, Boston has gained just 67 yards. So, his average return is just 6.7 yards per return. His longest of the year was 25 yards which came during the Northwestern game back in September.
Redshirt freshman wide receiver Keith Reynolds ran back the first 13 kickoff returns of the season, but since the second half of the Huskies’ game against Southern Cal, senior running back Daniyel Ngata has been the only one on the team to return a kickoff.
In Reynolds’ 13 returns, he’s averaging 23.5 yards per return with a long of 50 yards. Meanwhile, since the second half against the Trojans, Ngata has returned three kickoffs with an average of 27.7 yards per return, and his longest was just 30 yards. So, Ngata seems to be gaining more yards per return than Reynolds has even if the former has returned ten fewer kickoffs than the latter.
Go Bruins!!!
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