Pac-12 Countdown: South #4 UCLA
“UCLA sucks.” That’s the first thing you learn when you walk on campus at USC. And when you’re talking about football (and people at USC usually are) that’s generally true. UCLA is coming off a 4-8 season and on the verge of firing their third football coach in 10 years. In spite of being the largest school in the best recruiting pool this side of Texas, and playing in America’s most iconic stadium, the Bruins are an extremely mediocre 50-50 over the last seven years.
In 2008, Rick Neuheisel returned to his Alma Mater to work the same magic he had at Colorado and Washington, where he brought rare moments of national prominence to each school.
The NCAA was preparing to hammer USC like Mike Garrett had been robbing banks and using the money to buy cocaine for football recruits. Heralded coordinators DeWayne Walker and Norm Chow were moving to Westwood to join what looked to be the nation’s best coaching staff. USC was heading into recruiting battles with thirty scholarships tied behind its back and no post-season to offer potential recruits. It seemed completely inevitable that UCLA football would see its day in the Southern California sun.
There was only one problem—that thing about UCLA sucking. Even with all the advantages they could hope for, the Bruins have continued to lose recruiting battles not just with USC, but with schools all over the West. Neuheisel is 15-22 in three seasons and at the end of last season he took it out on his coaching staff. A number of Bruin assistants got the axe including legendary Offensive Corrdinator Norm Chow. Chow was fired after a disappointing season running the Pistol offense that Neuheisel installed. It was just as well. Asking Chow to run the pistol was like hiring Frank Ghery to design your tool shed.
Now Neuheisel is running his own offense and local and national analysts are suddenly predicting big things for the Bruins in 2011. ESPN’s Kirk Herbstreit called the Bruins his Pac-12 sleeper team and this week predicted they would win the Pac-12 South. Local analyst Petros Papidakis also loves the Bruins and has been touting them as a sleeper in the South.
You can find plenty of reasons to feel good about the Bruins this year as the team returns 17 starters and should have considerably better health than last season when the Bruins lost the 3rd most starts to injury in the FBS.
UCLA has had bad luck with QB health in recent years and started both Kevin Prince and Richard Brehaut last season. Both are back and healthy this season as are all of the
Which returning UCLA QB who threw more INTs than TDs is this? Does it matter?
Bruins leading rushers and three of five offensive linemen.
Stability is a great thing in a college program, but I will rain on everyone’s parade here and point out that the the 2010 offense from which nine starters return was awful. They averaged 317 yards per game, which was worst of the 12 Pac teams last year. Worse than Colorado (360), worse than Washington State (330), and more than 100 yards worse than USC (431).
Brehaut and Prince do indeed come back this season, but again, you have to wonder if that’s a good thing. In 2010, the pair combined for a pathetic 9 touchdowns and 12 interceptions. The Bruins released their depth chart this week, but left the QB position off it meaning neither player has distinguished himself for the job yet. In a quarterback driven league like the Pac-12, this is a big problem.
UCLA’s pistol is a run-first offense and the running game looks to be solid for the Bruins in 2011. They return two backs who averaged better than 5 ypc last year in Jonathan Franklin and Derrick Coleman, and most of their O-line. The Bruins averaged 176 rushing yards per game in 2010, which was good for fourth in the Pac-10 behind USC, Stanford and Oregon (though well behind the latter two). With so many starters returning and a year of the pistol under their belts, UCLA should be a formidable smash-mouth team this year.
UCLA has produced some fantastic defensive NFL talent in recent years, but after losing Pac-12 Defensive POY Brian Price in 2009, not even stars Akeem Ayers and Raheem Moore could keep them from making a big defensive dip in 2010. As with the offense, the good news is UCLA has nearly all its starters returning this year (eight of eleven). The bad news is, Ayers and Moore are not among them and the returners are a group that performed pretty badly last season. The Bruins gave up 420 yards and 30 points per game in 2010. In both categories, only Washington State was worse.
The Bruins do return their two leading tacklers from last year in safety Tony Dye and linebacker Sean Westgate, but it’s hard to see how a unit could lose Ayers and Moore and get better. Look for more defensive mediocrity from the Bruins this season.
The schedule doesn’t do UCLA many favors. They open in Houston against a UH team whose season UCLA ruined last year when the Bruins knocked the Cougar’s top two QBs out for the season. The humidity should be 85% + and it’s hard to imagine a circumstance where a CUSA team could be any madder at a Pac-12 team.
The Bruins also have a September revenge date with Texas and five Pac-12 road games. UCLA gets only 4 conference home games and they burn two of them on the worst team in each division (WSU and Colorado). They do avoid Oregon this season, but they face USC, Stanford and Utah on the road. Arizona State will visit Pasadena this season, but the Bruins lost to the Sun Devils by three TDs last year, and the Rose Bowl alone won’t make up that difference.
If UCLA can finally shake the injury bug and get vastly improved performance at quarterback, they will be a solid team with a good shot at bowl eligibility, but contenders for the South they are not. A 7-5 season would be a three game improvement for UCLA and it doesn’t look like a good time for Bruin fans to get greedy