On the eve of UCLA Football’s 2016 spring practice, Go Joe Bruin looks into the major philosophical shift that could come to define Jim Mora’s tenure with the Bruins.
As the 2015 football season approached, there was a cautious optimism about UCLA football’s chances to secure a division crown and possibly contend for higher honors. Although the media picked the Bruins to finish third in the Pac-12 South, that was primarily down to one issue: replacing star quarterback Brett Hundley with highly-rated true freshman Josh Rosen.
The rest of the team, though, was considered to be loaded. With premium talents like Kenny Clark, Myles Jack, Paul Perkins, and Eddie Vanderdoes to be found throughout the roster, pundits expected Jim Mora‘s squad to soar if Rosen was able to quickly establish himself as a top-flight college quarterback.
UCLA Bruins
However, when the season started, a funny thing happened: by and large, Rosen was an absolute phenom who was one of the best quarterbacks in the Pac-12 from Week 1 on… but the rest of the team found itself struggling to perform to its potential on a week-to-week basis, especially the defense under new defensive coordinator Tom Bradley.
Time would seem to be of the essence for UCLA to break through the glass ceiling of 9 regular season wins and pursue the Pac-12 title in earnest, given the likelihood that the Bruins will only have the generational talents of Rosen for two more seasons.
We cannot emphasize this point enough: 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?
With the most naturally talented quarterback in the program’s history behind center and solid recruiting efforts stocking the roster with athletes aplenty, the next two seasons are the kind in which a program should go all in and cater to its strengths in order to overwhelm any potential weaknesses.
Curiously though, this is instead the moment in which Mora has decided to take a sharp philosophical turn in order to cover up a few glaring weaknesses in his program. While adjustments were absolutely necessary after a turbulent 2015 season, the type of adjustments that are being proposed represent a startling gamble that has a high probability of taking the two most important seasons of his time in charge of UCLA football — the years remaining with Rosen — and unnecessarily turning them into rebuilding years by minimizing his program’s strengths.
Next: The Problems
The Problems
There are many rationalizations that can be made for UCLA football’s struggles in 2015 (an absurd spate of defensive front seven injuries is the most common), but the two most important reasons that the Bruins did not play up to their potential in 2015 were the glaring philosophical misalignment of the two primary sides of the ball, offense and defense, and a conspicuous refusal to adjust to the realities of the team as the season progressed.
Philosophical Misalignment
The tl;dr version of the schematic philosophical issue goes like this: a hurry-up offense designed to get up the field quickly did not mesh with a defense designed to limit big plays by playing a non-aggressive style.
Related Story: UCLA Football Spring Practice Preview – Defensive Line
With the offense trying to get off the field quickly by scoring after four- or five-play drives and the defense content to give up small chunks of yards at a time in order to avoid being burned over the top, the result was a time of possession imbalance that left the defense absolutely gassed by the end of most games after having spent close to double the amount of time on the field as the offense. It wasn’t uncommon to see the Bruins concede more than 40 minutes of possession in a game while having less than 20 minutes with the ball for themselves, which creates a razor-thin margin of error for an offense and enormous amounts of fatigue for a defense.
Failure to Stop the Run
One thing that UCLA did not set out to do schematically on defense was become sieve-like in stopping the run. Poor to mediocre rushing attacks like Nebraska, BYU, and Colorado routinely subjected the Bruin defense to “death by a thousand cuts” by picking up 4-6 yards a carry. And we won’t detail the gruesome manner in which very good rushing teams like Arizona, Stanford and USC thoroughly dominated the UCLA defensive front in the run game.
Failure to Adjust
However, despite surely realizing at some point that the run defense was a huge liability, UCLA’s defensive coaches at no point made any readily visible attempt to adjust the scheme away from the base 4-2-5, commit more linebackers and safeties to run blitzing, or generally do anything outside of staying the course and persisting with soft six- and seven-man coverages to negate the big pass even while the defensive line was getting gashed through the middle repeatedly.
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Also, the UCLA secondary finished at the top of the conference against the pass, sparing Demetrice Martin‘s group a lot of the criticism leveled at other units on the team. However, one would imagine that if the Bruin coaches truly trusted that the secondary was as good as its statistics indicated, they would have diverted resources away from pass coverage and into filling gaps against the run.
Even in a game in which the secondary struggled, Bradley’s defense continued to be stubborn and inflexible in adjusting to an opponent’s offensive game. Washington State used a quick and short passing game to march up the field in small chunks in lieu of an interior running game. While the effect on time of possession was not as glaring as it would have been against a rushing-based attack, the Bruins still did not make adjustments to counter the short passing game by playing press coverage against the Cougars to take the short throws away and daring them to beat the UCLA secondary down the field instead.
When there is evidence of woes against either the run or the pass in certain games (but strangely enough, no games in which the Bruins were susceptible to both the run and the pass), that points to stubbornness and a refusal to change the status quo in order to change the trajectory of the matchup.
Next: The Riskiness of Mora's Vision
The Riskiness of Mora’s Vision
After the need to bring offensive and defensive philosophies in line (and subsequently solve the time of possession issue that absolutely haunted last year’s squad) became impossible to ignore, Mora indeed acted by making a major schematic change to create philosophical harmony. However, curiously, the changes Mora made were exclusively on the offensive side of the ball, as he made the much ballyhooed move to promote running backs coach Kennedy Polamalu to offensive coordinator in order to institute a transition to a pro-style offense and away from Noel Mazzone‘s high-tempo, no-huddle spread.
While there are no doubts that Mazzone had to be replaced as offensive coordinator, his scheme was not the problem with the offense. Despite having few plays, Mazzone’s offense itself was a resounding success at UCLA, putting up record numbers by running simple concepts that were easy for college players (like, say, an uber-intelligent true freshman quarterback) to learn and perfect from the get-go.
Mazzone’s main issue as a coach (overlooking his recruiting inadequacies), much like Bradley’s, was an absolute refusal to adapt in situations that screamed out for adjustments after a defense had sussed out Mazzone’s initial gameplan. His short-yardage play-calling was a particular problem, as the Bruins averaged a subpar 2.45 yards per carry on third-and-short largely because Mazzone had a well-known predilection to run right up the gut in short-yardage situations for which opposing defenses were well-prepared.
Nonetheless, those were problems that could have been dealt with by simply hiring a better play-caller of a spread, and it wouldn’t have been very difficult to attract one of those when the chance to coach Rosen and a plethora of new playmakers was on offer, as teams like Baylor and Ohio State have shown that a spread can still be multi-faceted and predicated on power.
Related Story: UCLA Football Spring Practice Preview – Offensive Line
Conceptually speaking, a pro-style offense modeled on modern Stanford or classic USC teams emphasizes the run to set up play action passes down the field and revolves around the idea that grinding out possessions will grind out clock, keep your defense fresh, and wear out the opposing defense as the game progresses.
In one sense, it’s totally logical: anyone who follows me on Twitter knows I love to tweet “Win the line of scrimmage, win the game.” But there’s also this flip side with a grind-it-out offense: when you minimize possessions, you minimize your offense’s margin for error. A pro-style team can dominate for the most part and still lose inexplicably because it didn’t make the most of its limited offensive possessions, regardless of whether those possessions drained the clock or not (also known as a USC at Stanford in 2014 or even a Colorado at UCLA in 2015).
Also, power running is not exclusive to a pro-style system. For example, Ohio State’s evisceration of Oregon on the ground in the first Playoff Championship game involved the use of power running concepts out of a spread formation. Baylor just destroyed a 10-win North Carolina team on the ground in the 2015 Russell Athletic Bowl, racking up an obscene 645 rushing yards (!!!) by running veer concepts out a shotgun spread. So if UCLA is changing to a pro-style because it sees that as its only recourse to reestablish the toughness of its offensive line, then that is a misguided and uninformed decision.
Mora decided that the offense was the unit of the team in need of an overhaul rather than the previously discussed defense, as is his prerogative as the football program’s leader. However, that choice is fraught with risks that realistically threaten to impede the team’s ability to maximize its potential while Rosen is the quarterback.
Next: The Riskiness of Mora's Vision - Part II
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
The Riskiness of Mora’s Vision – Part III
Mora’s Teams Were Their Best When They Were Aggressive
Reflecting on Jim Mora’s tenure as UCLA coach to date, it seems fair to say that Mora’s best teams so far were his first two in 2012 and 2013. Mora brought much-needed competence to the program and was able to finally develop the considerable amount of talent that Rick Neuheisel had brought in, leading the Bruins to a Pac-12 South title and the most heartbreaking of losses in the Pac-12 Championship Game at Stanford in 2012.
In the past two years, there have been plenty of times when one could say the Bruins were physically beat up by an opponent as they were played off the field, but that was a truly rare occurrence in those first two seasons. Not so coincidentally, 2012 and 2013 happened to be the years in which the defense was run by the hyper-aggressive Lou Spanos, who was so blitz-happy at the start of his time at UCLA that he actually had to have his blitzing tendencies curtailed after the Bruins were curiously (and infamously) beaten by an awful Cal team in the sixth game of the 2012 season.
Although the records for 2012 and 2013 were the same as that in 2014 and a game better than 2015’s, the Bruin defense in those first two years never looked as hopeless as UCLA’s post-Spanos defenses have been at times. Instead, the indelible image of those defenses is that of thumpers like Anthony Barr, Jordan Zumwalt, and Cassius Marsh playing with a physical edge that gave the Bruins a mental edge against most of their weaker-willed opponents. And in the event that an opponent did score, there was no bother because the Bruins had confidence that Hundley and the offense would be able to get that score back.
Tom Bradley’s defenses (and Jeff Ulbrich before him) have none of that edge. Instead, the phrase associated with this defense is the dreaded “bend-but-don’t-break”. After five recruiting cycles under Jim Mora, UCLA has stocked its defensive cupboard with athletes galore who would love to be let loose and use their physical gifts to gallop through space and fly to the ball. Unfortunately, the faithful have now become accustomed to frustratedly watching as opposing offenses gladly churn out small chunks of yards at a time while sapping the souls of Bruin defensive players who just want to get off the field, Bruin offensive players who are itching to get on the field, and Bruin fans who cannot wait for the offensive drive to resolve itself one way or another if only so they can move on with their lives.
It stands to reason that when a team is presently built around athleticism rather than bulk, the best system to maximize those athletes would center around putting those athletes in space and letting them go at maximum tilt rather than restraining them and turning them into automotons on both sides of the ball. As we stated previously: 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.
Next: TL:DR
TL;DR
There are plenty of other arguments that we could flesh out in more detail, like the unlikelihood that a team famed for its lack of discipline can pull off a system designed around discipline and efficiency, and UCLA’s awful track record with position coaches, like Jeff Ulbrich, Chuck Bullough, and Jim Svoboda, who were promoted to coordinator spots.
But the overarching point is this (“oh, NOW you make it simple and straight-forward” — the brave readers who have gotten this far): based on close observation of this team, its strengths, and its weaknesses, it would be hard to argue that the short-term solution to UCLA’s philosophical imbalance (and its subsequent residual effect throughout the schemes and gameplans) is for UCLA to become even more conservative rather than more aggressive. But this is the road that Mora has chosen for his team.
Jim Mora is more invested in the success of this experiment than we as fans ever can be, so there has to be a degree of latitude granted to him to make the choices that he feels best suit his vision for his program. This piece is merely one fan’s expression of concern based on a bird’s-eye view of things.
We’ve talked in facts for the most part so far, but permit us some editorial commentary to conclude: from this nacho-eating fan’s perspective, it seems foolish to change to an offense that, if executed properly, takes the game out of Josh Rosen’s hands. After all, even Stanford with Andrew Luck still lost a couple dumb games each season because it was bit in the behind by its conservatism and refusal to let Luck be a true focal point rather than a facilitator.
Rosen is UCLA’s single best offensive asset and possesses every single tool imaginable, from a rocket arm with pinpoint accuracy to a supercomputer for a brain. Emphasize him rather than minimize him.
Next: UCLA Football Spring Practice Preview – Special Teams
It is this fan’s hope that Mora’s chosen path immediately reveals itself to be the right one, because for UCLA football, the time to win is now. UCLA will not have another Josh Rosen in its midst for a long time to come and if this philosophical shift does not reap immediate benefits, then UCLA will have wasted its ultimate trump card and its best chance at a national championship since Cade McNown‘s team in 1998. Who knows when the next chance and the next elite quarterback talent will come around in Westwood?