UCLA Football: Play call/outcome analysis from the USC game

Season Long Trend Chart

We’ve already covered how well they stayed out of passing downs (season-low passing downs on  24% of plays) and how much they ran the ball (64% run plays). The run emphasis empowered passing game to have the best pass success rate of the season (56%).

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The 6.8 overall YPP was also exceptional (2nd best of the season to last week, well above national average of 5.7). It’s been true for a few weeks that if you look at the chart starting at Colorado and throw out Utah (and maybe squint a little), the most important indicators are trending favorably in a sustained way.  Chip is getting it all put together. The UCLA staff definitely has a much better visualization, but this is the kind of view they will take into upcoming recruiting visits

This week was a blast to log after the last few UCLA games featured nothing but 11 personnel running vanilla IZRs and a misdirection free passing attack.  This week we saw Pistol, OZRs, more personnel variety, a 2QB gimmick, Arc blocking, unbalanced line with multiple callable plays, and increased Check-With-Me and pre-snap motion. It’s almost as if Chip knew this one was important for the narrative and was work-shopping/building the pieces through the middle of the PAC-12.  Almost.

Dear Chip: the Sanford streak is important for the narrative!

Footnote

The google doc linked here has every UCLA offense play logged with the situation, pre-snap details, and post snap results. I like to look for how the situation and pre-snap looks inform play calling and results. In the past, I’ve done this (on staff) for the SBN NFL Chargers blog, and got a lot of great reader participation.

My hope is that readers look at it and find stuff along with me (something pre-snap is a tell, something else very successful). This post introduces the column which has context for everything in the log.