Over at Bruin Roar CalPolyBruinFan posted a pretty good statisical analysis of UCLA coaches' conservative play calling from last season. I urge you to read the whole post. CPB zeroes in on playcalling in the dreaded red zone and in goal-line situations. The conlcusion he reached is not suprising to anyone here on BN. CPB found Karl Dorrell's offense not very aggressive in the red zone:
UCLA ran the ball 82 times in the red zone and passed it only 42 times. When you compare that to USC, it seems pretty conservative. The Trojans actually passed more in the red zone, 75 times to only 60 rushing attempts. At first I thought that was a pretty glaring difference, but if you look at other top offenses in the conference, like California, they had a similar ratio of passes to runs (2 runs for every 1 pass). Oregon falls in the middle between the pass happy Trojans and the run heavy Bruins and Bears. These numbers don't really give us a clear answer either way but it definitely doesn't point to UCLA being very aggressive in the red zone.
And confirmed KD's unimaginative, boring, conservative, Donahuesque run-run-pass calls in goal-line situations:
It looks like the offense followed the run-run-pass pattern pretty consistently. When we followed that pattern, we gained very few yards. When we broke the pattern, we were one of the more successful teams in the conference. Unfortunately, last season we followed that conservative pattern far too often. So it should come as no surprise that the Bruins had the 3rd lowest TD percentage of all PAC-10 teams in goal-to-go situations.
CPB also wanted to bring our attention to this:
I'm sure the guys over at Bruins Nation and Dump Dorrell will be interested to know that when you perform this same analysis for the games where Dorrell had input (i.e. after the WSU game) and when just Svoboda was in charge (i.e. WSU and earlier) there is virtually no difference in the plays called. In fact, Dorrell was even more conservative, passing the ball only 26% of the time in the red zone to Svoboda's 39%. In goal line situations the team followed the run-run-pass pattern almost exclusively when Dorrell was helping call the shots.
CPB mentions that how the team "did better after the WSU game (341 yards/gm) than before (321 yards/gm) even with tougher opponents." However, as we detailed in this post heading into the Southern Cal game that slightly better offensive production was little misleading. The numbers beginning the Cal game was boosted by a heap of garbage points/yards against Cal when the game was effectively out of reach. Moreover, the passing number was boosted by two huge plays against ASU in a game in which the Bruin offense was otherwise pathetic as we call it Dorrellian.As for the victory against Southern Cal, sure PC had some timely runs but it was our defense which gave us the victory. And I don't really want to get into the pathetic performance against FSU.
We can do all the analysis we want here ladies and gentleman. But it really all comes down to this: what matters is what your "eyes" see. Trust your "eyes." If you were closely watching Dorrell's offense last year, time and time you would see a mediocre offensive product, which failed to show any ability to sustain drives by putting together a mistake free, fluid, multi-dimensional offense, keeping opposing Ds on their heels. There was no flow to that offense as it seemed to be depending on its defense to bail the team out from it's impotent performance on the field.
I know we are hearing a lot of hype about Jay Norvell this off-season. But to me this is still Dorrell's offense. While he has been going through one offensive coordinators after another running away from taking any responsibility for UCLA's pathetic and inept offensive performances, time and time we have been hearing the same bullsh!t about how we need to give his WCO a chance. Well this is it. There is not going to be any escpaing from responsibilty this season if we keep seeing the same pathetic Dorrellian play calling leading to same pathetic results. I know Norvell is the OC now. But it is Dorrell's offense. He needs to be held accountable for what we see with our eyes this year when the offense is on the field.
Once again it comes down to:
If not now, when.
GO BRUINS.