UCLA Football: Summarizing Chip Kelly’s 2018 offensive scheme

Yards Per Play and Pace

In terms of pace, the Bruins logged 846 total plays in twelve games for 70.5 plays per game average. This pace puts them ranked somewhere around #50 nationally in plays per game.  Syracuse of all teams was the plays per game leader nationally with almost 85 plays per game.  Plays per game are of course influenced by what the opposing offense is doing, but it’s still a useful gross indicator for pace.

It was popular before the season to envision an elite run oriented Blur-like offense making defenses look silly at the Rose Bowl, while we got a bottom third nationally, pass first grab bag offense.  While this narrative seems bleak, the good news is that linear trend lines for both YPP and Success Rate trended solidly up through the course of the season.  UCLA Optimists will conclude that depleted talent (via both departures and suspensions) and time needed to establish the system/culture were the primary drivers of the sub-par performance.

These trend charts prove out the steady progress of player execution (because I don’t think the basic scheme changed significantly over the course of the season). Pessimists will bring out the theory that the NFL broke Chip. There is also the thought that Chip wrote off this season as “Year 0” and used it as one big science experiment (or… workshop). This off-season, I’ll cuddle up with those favorable linear trend lines as a reason to be hopeful and patient.

The Blur as a Point of Reference

The Oregon Blur (2007-2012) Fishduck Youtube tutorials (#1 IZR, #2 OZR, #3 Power, #4 Straddled Triple Option, #5 Universal Formation, and The Sweep Read) form an important foundation for understanding what UCLA is doing currently. UCLA is not executing the Blur, but the DNA and all the same building blocks are in the UCLA playbook.  It’s easy to summarize the Blur – a core set of well-executed shotgun zone-read plays, run with extreme tempo, spread wide to run, where the established run sets up screens and downfield passing.  Troy Thomas, the coach at Servite High School in Anaheim at the time was quoted in the NY Times in 2011 explaining the simplicity this way:

"One of the best things I took from Oregon is that they run the same plays from multiple formations. Your offensive line is doing the same thing over and over and over again. No matter what the formation is and what’s going on behind them. That was one of the things I liked about it."

It’s not as easy to summarize UCLA this year. As we try to define the UCLA offense, we will often wind up comparing to the Blur as a reference.