UCLA Football: The best game plan to upset Oklahoma

The UCLA Football Bruins host the Oklahoma Sooners in Week 3 of the college football season with a very, very slim chance to upset the fifth-ranked team.

The UCLA Football team has not started the season off on the right foot as the team dropped the opening game of the year against Cincinnati and then were victims of an upset loss against San Diego State in Week 2.

Now, the Bruins look to be upset winners against the Oklahoma Sooners in Week 3 to get in the win column. The problem is that they would be a bigger upset winner than San Diego State was to them, as the Sooners are the fifth-ranked school in the country, have one of the best quarterbacks in the country and are 23-point road favorites at the time of writing this.

To be completely honest, I do not blame any Bruin fan if they completely dismiss this game and want to go out with their friends on Saturday night instead of watching. This has all the makings of being an ugly, ugly blowout.

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However, anything is possible in football and if the Bruins are going to win this game they are going to have to follow a precise gameplan, which focuses on targeting a potential weakness of the Sooners.

The Bruins have to pound the ball. UCLA is going to have to run the ball 75 percent of the time in this game to even be close to being successful. The team is going to have to chip away the clock and hope that the Oklahoma offense can make a few mistakes to allow UCLA to stay in the game and suck the life out of them.

The Sooners allowed Houston to rack up 241 rushing yards in the first week of the season, which allowed them to stay in the game, although they still lost by 18. 103 of those rushing yards were picked up by Houston quarterback D’Eriq King.

So it is going to have to be more than Joshua Kelley and Dorian Thompson-Robinson has to finally realize his potential as a dual-threat quarterback, evade the pocket and make plays happen with his feet. We have not seen much of that in his two years as UCLA quarterback and maybe that is why he has struggled.

Because, to be completely honest, Thompson-Robinson has not been good at all as UCLA’s quarterback. If Chip Kelly is planning on putting the ball in his hands to make plays via the passing game, there is absolutely no chance that UCLA wins this game.

That is a recipe for turnovers and stopping the clock, all of which will lead to Oklahoma’s potent offense scoring more points.

Maybe the plan is RPOs that allows Robinson to make short passes that UCLA can then hopefully turn into big plays. Unless something is completely wide open downfield, I wouldn’t want to see him make any pass attempts of over 15 yards in this game.

You are not going to out-offense Oklahoma. You have to just hope to keep them off the field as much as possible, play the time game and hope, hope that Jalen Hurts throws a pivotal interception or that somehow the ball can get loose in a ballcarrier’s hand one or two times.

And when you need all of that in order to get a win then it is probably a good sign that you are not going to win.

Next. Three takeaways from UCLA's loss to SDSU. dark

So while it is certainly possible, I would not expect the UCLA football team to win its first game of the year on Saturday.

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