UCLA Football: Play call/outcome analysis from the Arizona St game

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(Photo by Jennifer Stewart/Getty Images) /

It is once again time for play calling/outcome analysis for the UCLA football team, which unfortunately ended in another loss at the hands of the Arizona State Sun Devils.

Even if you completely set aside UCLA football‘s final possession, this week’s offensive performance is simultaneously encouraging and frustrating. They set or matched season highs in Yards-Per-Play (7.0 this week, previous best 6.5 vs Washington), Overall Success Rate (49% this week, matching the Cal game), and Pass Success Rate (54% this week, previous best 50% vs Cal). They moved the ball as well as they have all season, you can’t argue with the objective production, but there was nothing exciting or novel about the approach this week.

The scheme buffet was closed for renovations. The TE party was canceled. QB keeps were not a factor, OZRs don’t exist, formations were vanilla, and trickery/misdirection was absent. As we will see in the details, there is a ton of upside potential that is not being leveraged by Chip’s play calls (at least according to this scrub internet blogger with a spreadsheet).

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Is Chip trying to win by bending his offense to the limitations of the available personnel, or is he stubbornly jamming the available square peg personnel into the round hole scheme he wants to run? Is Chip even trying to win, or just saving all his brilliant variety for further down the road (hoping for this feels more and more like wishful fantasy)? This week proves the “workshop” theory either never was or has run its course to completion.

We knew coming into the game against Arizona State that S&P+ showed a huge rushing advantage for UCLA (#23 ranked rushing offense vs. #99 rushing defense) and only a marginal advantage passing (#76 ranked passing offense vs. #89 passing defense). In spite of that, they passed twice as much as they ran, and were still more successful than is typical for this team.

This week more than any other has me personally in the “Broke Chip” spin cycle. I have no idea how hard schematically Chip is trying to win this year, and I have no idea what style of offense he wants to run in 2018 NCAA football if personnel was not a limiting factor.

YPP Chart

This week in the YPP chart, I have added different symbols for a run and a pass on each individual play. Overall, there is much more consistency this week in the rolling average. They started the run game with five straight run successes on the first possession, but only had another five-run successes the rest of the way. This is weird!

The first two possessions of the third quarter were not good. Chip must figure out halftime adjustment philosophy for next year. There were also a few more negative plays than the last couple weeks (5 total negative plays in weeks 8 and 9, 5 total negative plays this week). It’s really a shame they were fairly productive, efficient, and mostly consistent for a full game this week, but all anyone will remember was that disasterous last possession.