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UCLA Football: Weekly variations in the 2018 offense

By Chris Osgood

NORMAN, OK - SEPTEMBER 08: Head coach Chip Kelly of the UCLA Bruins during the game against the Oklahoma Sooners at Gaylord Family Oklahoma Memorial Stadium on September 8, 2018 in Norman, Oklahoma. The Sooners defeated the Bruins 49-21. (Photo by Brett Deering/Getty Images)
NORMAN, OK - SEPTEMBER 08: Head coach Chip Kelly of the UCLA Bruins during the game against the Oklahoma Sooners at Gaylord Family Oklahoma Memorial Stadium on September 8, 2018 in Norman, Oklahoma. The Sooners defeated the Bruins 49-21. (Photo by Brett Deering/Getty Images) /
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(Photo by Brett Deering/Getty Images)
(Photo by Brett Deering/Getty Images) /

Go Joe Bruin looks at the weekly variations used by UCLA football head coach Chip Kelly in 2018 to try and analyze the evolution of the offense.

In order to fill the gap in spring ball news, let’s take one last look back at UCLA football’s 2018 offense scheme and how it morphed throughout the season. If you haven’t read our giant 2018 scheme summary article, that is a good primer for this post.

This chart shows the number of snaps and success rate for various schematic “wrinkles” that we tracked throughout the season. It’s busy, but just stare at it for a minute and it’ll start to make sense. You can see high usage items in blue, high success rates in green, and low success rates in red. All of my standard disclaimers apply about small sample size and the fact that there is probably much more nuance in the line blocking and receiver routes than is tracked here.

The first thing to notice is how the schematic complexity ebbed and flowed throughout the season. The “wrinkle floor” for any single game week was 3 items while the “wrinkle ceiling” peaked at 7 and 8 items the last two games.

Kelly started out the non-conference schedule (Cincinnati) very vanilla, and it looks like the baseline plan was to steadily add elements in a linear fashion throughout the season (weeks 1-3). After the win-less setbacks of the non-conference games; they scrapped the linear progression and got back to basics to open the conference slate against Colorado and Washington (weeks 4 and 5).

The two-game winning streak against Cal and Arizona featured a small local peak in wrinkles at 5 wrinkles each (weeks 6 and 7). They kept it on the simpler side for losses against Utah, Oregon, and Arizona St (weeks 8-10). The last two weeks show the coaching staff and player execution really coming together to deliver quite a bit of variation (without any notable procedural errors or penalties).