One of the litany of excuses we have been hearing from blindos during last two years is about how complicated Dorrell's West Coast Offense (WCO) really is. It takes time for college kids to learn that pro-set WCO. Dorrell did not have his OC of choice when he took over at UCLA (which begs the question - then why did he hire someone whose philosophy he never really agreed with). So that's why it hasn't panned out really so far. But it will certainly break out this year ... on and on and on.
Yet one question UCLA fans perhaps should ask - why the hell are we running a WCO in the first place? Why are we running a WCO, when we seemed to be doing fine without it during the McNowne era? Why can't we just run an offense that still uses a lot of spread formations, balances the running and passing games, but simplifies it - using everyone's skills - from TBs, FBs to all receivers. Heismanpundit has a really interesting observation on this, while he wrote about 6 most explosive offenses in the college game ("Gang of Six"), none of whom BTW are using KD's WCO:
Of course you will have some idiots trying to argue how KD's WCO offense showed a lot of promise in his second season, when he finally got to work with an OC like Tom Cable he is totally in sync with. But then again if you look closely into our last year's offensive statistics, you will find how inflated those so called improvements really were in Dorrell's second season. Back in January, I did the analysis of the so called improvement in KD's WCO in his second season. Moreover, lot of our rushing stats was totally inflated in the first half of the season because of the monster game Drew enjoyed against the Hapless Huskies up in Seattle. So really there wasn't much to write home about KD's WCO in his less than average 6-7 second season
So again, why the hell are we trying out this offense which really hasn't been successful at the college level? If this offense is so freaking complicated, why not simplify it? It seems like all the other explosive college offenses are sophisticated, but there is noting complicated about them unlike KD's quantum physics based WCO. Anyone have any answers?