SMQB: Putting UCLA's First Game of the DeShaun Foster Era in Perspective
Satruday's win was the first game under a first-time head coach. It's what happens moving forward that counts.
Welcome to this season’s return of the Sunday Morning Quarterback, albeit a late one which is being published neither on Sunday nor in the morning.
After UCLA’s comeback win on Saturday, I’ve been reading all sorts of reactions from fellow Bruin fans and I’m going to try to add some perspective to the State of UCLA Football one game into the 2024.
The first thing I’m seeing is a massive overreaction to Saturday’s game. How bad were some of the comments I read? They were so ridiculous that I’m not even going to give the authors credence by repeating some of the things I read, but if you posted a comment to one of The Mighty Bruin’s Facebook posts and it’s no longer there, I’m talking about you.
Suffice it to say, I know there’s absolutely no doubt among most Bruin fans that the team started slow and Hawai’i looked like the better team in the first half. There are likely all sorts of reasons why this was the case.
First off, the team had a nearly 2,500-mile flight to get there. You simply cannot understate the relevance of this fact. The distance to Hawai’i from LA is roughly equivalent to the distance from LA to New York.
There have literally been serious scientific studies done about the effects of long-distance travel on the performance of NFL teams. In fact, one study even showed that “West teams displayed uniformly high home winning percentages (75.0% and 68.4%) when playing Central and East teams.”
Translated to UCLA playing a game in Hawai’i, the Rainbow Warriors would be the West team while the Bruins would be equivalent to an Eastern NFL team traveling to play a West team. That immediately put the Bruins at a disadvantage.
The same study indicates that West teams traveling East are disadvantaged, though they can make adjustments to their schedule that help compensate for that disadvantage, such as flying out earlier. This could potentially be relevant later in the season when the team has to fly to play LSU, Penn State, Rutgers and even Nebraska.
Meanwhile, it could give the Bruins a distinct advantage over teams visiting from other time zones like Indiana, Minnesota and Iowa.
As a result, all of the doomsayers who seem to be all over Facebook claiming we’re going to be lucky to win three games this season need to be taken with a collective grain of salt.
Of course, the effects of travel isn’t the only factor to consider as we look forward.
Other factors include resiliency and adjustments, both of which the team and the coaching staff seemed to excel at on Saturday. After falling behind 10-0 in the first half, it would have been easy for the team to roll over in the second half. They didn’t. Instead, they kept fighting.
The Bruin defense held the Hawai’i offense without a touchdown after their very first drive. That stout defense is significant. It shows the potential continuation of where the defense was last season, even though some of the team’s best defensive playmakers have graduated and moved on. That’s a big deal and one of the biggest takeaways from Saturday’s game.
Another big takeaway from Saturday were the way the offense seemed to adjust in the second half. Now, I’m not necessarily going to suggest Eric Bienemy changed what he was doing or what he was calling in the second half, though it may certainly have been the case. It may have been a situation where a team playing its first game of the season simply got over their initial struggles and settled down to execute their offense. So, we should keep an eye on how the team plays in the second half moving forward. If they consistently play better in the second half, then you can definitely chalk it up to adjustments being made as the game progresses, but one game does not give us enough a large enough sample size to determine what may explain the significantly better second half performance.
Finally, today, let’s discuss the elephant in the room.
I found myself deleting several comments on the TMB’s Facebook posts which were extremely critical of the hiring of DeShaun Foster based on the results of one game. It’s as if some Bruin fans learned nothing from the start of the Chip Kelly era.
Believe me, I get it. Fans want results. Anyone who has read my writing over the past ten years (yes, it’s been that long), knows that I generally don’t pull punches when I think changes need to be made.
Heck, one of my favorite Bill Waltonisms came near the end of the Ben Howland era when during a broadcast, Big Red was asked how he would fix the Bruin basketball program. Bill responded by saying, “I’m not in charge, but if I were things would be different” and he left it at that.
I’m also the guy who walked through the Rose Bowl tunnel a few minutes after Chip Kelly’s inital game and wondered aloud, “Have we scored 40 points yet?”
Results are important. Of course, we should NEVER accept in a win what we would not accept in a loss, but let’s maintain some semblance of perspective here.
Ultimately, it’s the on-field results that will determine whether DeShaun Foster is the Bruins’ head coach for a few seasons, or if he’s here until he retires.
But winning the first game of the first season after being one of the last FBS head coaching hires of the year has about as much to do with the long-term success of the program as losing the first game of the first season after being one of the first, and most heralded, FBS coaching hires of the year.
It’s what happens next that counts.
So far, from everything we’ve seen, Coach Foster seems determined to rebuild recruiting — and you absolutely, positively cannot tell me that the lack of recruiting under Chip Kelly has not negatively influenced the state of the program and that will continue to be the case this season because Coach Foster wasn’t in charge of the program during the recruiting phase prior to his hiring/promotion.
A lot of us started reading and writing about the program all the way back when Karl Dorrell ran the program into the ground with his inability to recruit. Recruiting was so bad under Dorrell that the cupboard was completely bare when Rick Neuheisel took over. It took the entire Neuheisel era to restock the program with talent.
It was the recruiting of the Neuheisel era which led to the early success of the Jim Mora era.
If DeShaun Foster doesn’t have the program moving in a positive direction by the his fifth season, then we have a reason to be concerned, but for some people to start in on the doom and gloom after one game—which the team actually won—is just ridiculous.
All Bruin fans need to be patient as a head coach who has otherwise been a great Bruin gets his sea legs underneath him.
To be sure, there may be a long and frustrating season ahead of us, but let’s get out there and support this team. They didn’t quit on Saturday when they easily could have. That deserves some respect in my book.
Go Bruins!!!
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Agreed. GO, BRUINS!!
It was shockingly unexpected how unready Ethan Garbers looked in the first half—almost like a Freshman QB making his first start. His second half was closer to what I expected from him. By this morning, I was thinking of John Barnes and feeling better about Garbers and Bruins prospects.