UCLA Football Preview: Bruins Need to Watch Out for Zachariah Branch
Southern Cal's return man has two special teams touchdowns this season. Plus, a look at Lincoln Riley's coaching staff.
There’s a lot of speculation going on about the college football coaches in Los Angeles. Just yesterday, Tracy Pierson of Bruin Report Online reported that “numerous sources are indicating it's likely UCLA will fire Chip Kelly.” Of course, Pierson writes that the timing of Kelly’s departure will likely be tied to the outcome of Saturday’s game against Southern Cal.
Now, I hope Tracy’s sources are correct, but until there’s been an announcement from UCLA, take it with a grain of salt. At the very least, it appears that there is reason to believe that Kelly will be gone sooner rather than later.
Meanwhile, across town, there has been speculation for months that Lincoln Riley might be looking for a way to get himself out of the McKay Center. It seems like Riley has his eyes on the NFL and may try to work out a situation where he becomes the head coach of the team which eventually picks Caleb Williams to be their new starting quarterback.
Now, the speculation, which came from Scott Wolf’s Inside USC blog, focused, rather specifically, on the Chicago Bears. But if the NFL season ended today, the Bears would have the fifth pick in next year’s draft behind the Panthers, the Patriots, the Giants, and the Cardinals. With three wins, Chicago would need the Giants, the Cardinals and the Patriots to each win twice and the Panthers to win three times before the Bears would have the first pick overall. While there are six games left on most teams’ schedules, that still feels like a big lift for those four teams, given that they’ve only won seven games among them so far this year.
Knowing that, it seems like Southern Cal may have Riley for at least another year.
Of course, Riley’s Trojans have certainly underperformed this year. They were seen as a potential CFP team at the start of the season, but Notre Dame exposed Alex Grinch’s defense and, if not for a failed two-point conversion by UC Berkeley, Southern Cal would be in the midst of a five-game losing streak.
With the losses piling up, Riley had no choice but to fire defensive coordinator Alex Grinch who had come to the school with him. In his place, Riley has named inside linebackers coach Brian Odom and defensive line coach Shaun Nua as the interim co-defensive coordinators.
Odom began his coaching career as a defensive quality control assistant at Washington State in 2015 and 2016. He then moved on to become the outside linebackers coach for Missouri for two seasons before joining Riley’s staff at Oklahoma.
After starting his coaching career at BYU, Nua joined the staff of current UCLA director of leadership Ken Niumatalolo, when he was the head coach at Navy. Nua was the Navy defensive line coach from 2012 until 2017. After spending 2018 on the staff at Arizona State, he became the defensive line coach at Michigan until 2021. He was hired by Riley when he took over the Trojans.
With Riley being an offensive coach, it wouldn’t be surprising if he didn’t have an offensive coordinator, but he does. It’s still John Henson, who joined the Southern Cal staff after working with at Texas A&M under Jimbo Fisher. Before A&M, he was coached the offensive line at Oklahoma State and Missouri. At Mizzou, he was also the team’s offensive coordinator.
Of course, the other interesting tidbit is that former UCLA assistance Roy Manning is still on Riley’s staff. Manning is another one of the assistants who came with Riley from Oklahoma.
Let’s look at the Southern Cal special teams.
Special Teams
Denis Lynch is back for his redshirt sophomore season with the Trojans. Last season, he made 68.2% of his field goal attempts and he’s been been even better this season, making eight out of his ten attempts this season. His two misses came from between 30 and 39 yards. He’s actually made all three attempts from 40 yards or more, including one from 53 yards.
He has also handled the majority of kickoffs this year, taking 51 of the team’s 81 total. Twelve of Lynch’s kickoffs have gone for touchbacks. His 60.6 yards per kickoff is a little lower than punter Eddie Czaplicki, who has averaged 63.6 yards on his 30 kickoffs with 14 going for touchbacks.
Czaplicki, who transferred from Arizona State, has been the Trojans’ only punter this season, beating out last year’s punter Aadyn Sleep-Dalton for the job. His longest punt this season went for 57 yards and he’s averaging 43.6 yards per punt. Just four of his 40 punts have gone for touchbacks while 22 have been fair catches and 14 have landed inside the 20-yard line.
Freshman receiver Zacariah Branch, whose great-uncle is former Raider Cliff Branch, has returned most of the punts and kickoffs for Southern Cal this season. He has returned 15 of the team’s 21 punt returns. He is averaging 20.6 yards per punt return and he was able to return one punt for a 75-yard touchdown. Michael Jackson III has returned five punts for a total of 25 yards with his longest being just 9 yards.
Branch has also returned 22 of the team’s 27 kickoff returns. While he’s averaging 17.7 yards per kickoff return, his longest return was a 96-yard touchdown. Makai Lemon has returned the other five kickoffs and is averaging 18.8 yards per return.
Go Bruins!!! Beat $c!!!
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What are we doing for a basketball game thread tonight?
I’m torn. If as seems likely we get tattooed Kelly’s outta here. But if we win it’s still $C…