UCLA Football vs. Washington 2017: The three plays edition

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Now that the emotion of Saturday’s loss has faded let Go Joe Bruin return you to the Washington game to provide you with three UCLA Football plays that sum up that loss to the Huskies.

It was an ugly loss for the UCLA Football team there’s no denying that. The run defense has been consistently far below par and that continued. The Offense, usually the saving grace of this team fell flat against a strong Washington defense and QB Josh Rosen was knocked out of the game.

The entire game from start to finish featured a handful of good plays by the Bruins and buckets of underwhelming play by them too.

There’s a number of plays that helped shape that game but we are going to show you three plays that essentially epitomized this game for the Bruins. If all you see are these three plays you’d have a good idea what the rest of the game looked like for the UCLA Football team.

1. No Sharp Edges

It only makes sense that we start with the very first play of the game. The Bruins won the toss and deferred to the second half so we got to the see the Bruin defense right away. Coming into this game we knew that the UCLA Football defense had struggled mightily with run defense all season long. We also knew the Washington Huskies would not shy away from the ground attack despite losing their starting left tackle in their previous game.

The Bruins came out in a 3-4 front with Kenny Young and Krys Barnes as the inside linebackers. Keisean Lucier-South and Marcus Moore made up the edges with Jacob Tuioti-Mariner, Boss Tagaloa and Chigozie Nnoruka as your down linemen. The Bruins used this defensive formation against Memphis to slow the read-option running attack and it actually worked well.

The part of the play I want you to focus on is the left side of the line of scrimmage. Right before snapping the ball the Huskies sent a man in motion on a sweep action. That caused Young to take a false step towards the sideline as he followed the motion. At the snap the right side of the Washington line blocked down to their left and pulled the right guard as a lead blocker.

The entire left side of the Bruin line collapsed down including KLS who was lifted off his feet by a tight end. Young was engulfed by the pulling guard and Myles Gaskin ran for a 13 yard gain.

If you can’t set a hard edge you can expect to be gouged in the run game. A defensive end, even a college defensive end, should give you more of an edge and not be so easily moved off his spot. He wasn’t the lone issue on that play though. JTM also was moved off his spot but in his defense it looks like he ended up having to take on a double team between the tackle and the tight end lined up next to him.

This wasn’t a one time thing either. This same scenario played out in the trenches at least three more times in the first half and more than a few times in the second half.

The Bruins don’t have the beef they need to be stout inside or outside and this play is a perfect snapshot of the UCLA Football run defense this season. They’re struggling at the point of attack and not getting off blocks which allows offensive linemen to get to the second level for big gains. Gaining size, strength are paramount as this team moves forward.