The Philosophical Gamble That Could Define The Jim Mora Era Of UCLA Football

The Riskiness of Mora’s Vision – Part II

The Roster Isn’t Yet Suited For A Pro-Style Offense

For football coaches at the FBS level, fitting square pegs into round holes seems like the absolute height of folly. The best coaches instead fit their schemes around their players. However, taking a look at the offensive personnel based on Go Joe Bruin’s spring positional previews,  Mora’s choice to move to a pro-style offense seems like a lot of the former and not so much of the latter.

The choice to move to a pro-style offense presumably stems from UCLA’s utter inability to cope with the Stanford Cardinal since Jim Harbaugh got that program humming. Coming from the NFL, Mora sees Stanford and sees the team he wishes he had. Unfortunately for Mora, his roster as presently constructed seems completely ill-suited for a transition to professional schemes.

We are going to quote this entire paragraph one more time: Josh Rosen is the single most consequential player that has played at UCLA since Troy Aikman. When a team has a generational talent at quarterback, the team’s ceiling is absolutely unlimited. As such, it stands to reason that every single decision made about the program for the next two years needs to be made with one question in mind: does this put Rosen in a better position to lead UCLA to a national championship?

There is a compelling case to be made that Rosen seems to be ideally suited to a pro-style scheme. He can run when necessary, as we saw against Washington State, but he is at his best as a pocket passer.

A pro-style system, though, is not built around its quarterback, but rather its offensive line. Case in point: Stanford had just as much, if not more success with the physically limited (except for those times when he saw UCLA jerseys on the other side of the ball and promptly turned into Superman) Kevin Hogan at the helm than with Andrew Luck, the probable best quarterback of his generation, behind center. That is because by the time Hogan took over for Luck, Stanford’s reputation for producing grinding offensive lineman was well entrenched and the Cardinal had reached a point of reloading their offensive lines each year rather than rebuilding them.

That means that in all likelihood, UCLA’s transition to a pro-style scheme will be made or broken by the ability of its offensive line to adjust and adapt to the new schemes as quickly as possible. And based on the Bruins’ offensive line record under Mora, that reality spells trouble for the transition.

Mora was unlucky when he took over, as the one position at which his predecessor had left the cupboard bare was offensive line, but at this point, every offensive lineman on the roster is a Mora guy. Returning left tackle Conor McDermott might have been a Neuheisel recruit, but he never played a snap under Neuheisel and is (remarkably) entering his fifth year playing for offensive line coach Adrian Klemm.

UCLA’s sacks allowed totals while Brett Hundley was quarterback speak for themselves: 52 (!) sacks allowed in 2012, 36 sacks allowed in 2013, and 40 sacks allowed in 2014. While the pass blocking stats improved considerably while blocking for a less mobile and more decisive quarterback in 2015, with only 14 sacks allowed, the run blocking in short yardage situations fell off, as the Bruins dropped from 6.17 yards per carry in 3rd-and-short in 2013 to the aforementioned 2.45 yards per carry in those same situations last season. We also saw the offensive line allow defenses to hit Rosen considerably, if not sack him, in games like those against Utah, USC, and Nebraska.

The most-alarming statistic of those cited is the short-yardage rushing stat, which speaks to a pronounced inability to win the line of scrimmage in power-running situations. Such a statistic is not unexpected though, in light of the fact that Klemm was charged with finding mobile offensive linemen who could zone block and pull in a spread. Given how light the line is, with UCLA’s probable starting interior linemen Kenny Lacy, Jake Raulerson, and Scott Quessenberry all barely breaking 300 pounds on the scale, asking them to block as effectively as notable Stanford big uglies like Josh Garnett (325 pounds), David Yankey (320 pounds), and David DeCastro (316 pounds) seems like a huge ask.

This also seems like the appropriate point to briefly raise the concern that UCLA is attempting to remodel its offense on the fly into one that will emphasize tight ends and fullbacks… but there are no players on the spring roster with tight end and fullback experience, and the incoming reinforcements in the fall are project players who are unlikely to be effective plug-and-play options in 2016.

So the pro-style offense might be effective in fixing the time of possession issues if the blocking is working and chains are moving, but it is no panacea. Nor is the spread, for that matter. Accomplishing anything in football is dependent on marrying talent to execution, so it would seem to make sense to install schemes that your players are more likely to execute effectively. UCLA’s roster, full of lithe and fluid athletes rather than bruisers, seems more likely to run an Oregon style effectively, with its high-tempo offense and all-out defense that either creates negative plays and turnovers or gives up quick scores that allow the offense back onto the field, than it is a Stanford.

Even with a taskmaster like Jim Harbaugh in control, Stanford’s well-oiled offensive line machine was not built in a day; it was a conscious, painstaking effort that took hold over a three-year process before things were well and truly humming. To expect an undisciplined team like UCLA to transition from a full-fledged spread to a much different offense in a single offseason would require a large leap of faith. And with a limited amount of time until Rosen leaves for the NFL, it seems reasonable to say that an offensive remodel does not seem like the ideal way to maximize that time.

It would be one thing to implement these changes if UCLA was in a transition year and had the freedom to tinker and experiment, but Rosen’s presence on the roster demands a commitment to winning big in the present day and calls into question the prudence of potentially endangering the ability to do so by focusing on the offense as the source of schematic change rather than the defense.

Next: The Riskiness of Mora's Vision - Part III