I'd like to follow up on Achilles 's post from last night pointing to Mandel's article in SI.com.
One of the litany of excuses we have been hearing from Karl Dorrell apologists during the last four years has been about how complicated his West Coast Offense (WCO) really is. His offense has been a joke 3 out of his 4 years at UCLA. Sure, while UCLA piled up some nice numbers during his 3rd season (a glorified 10 win season), UCLA's offense often looked conservative, boring, stale, and mostly dead until it came alive during desperate fourth quarters when Dorrell and his OC Tom Cable had to loosen the reigns so they could get bailed out by the heroics of Maurice Drew.
Yeah, you are looking at "Dorrell's offense" in 2006 right there.
In other words, even during his over hyped "10 win season", when the Bruins keep getting bailed out by one miracle comeback after another, Dorrell pretty much coached like a pansie. It wasn't his WCO that was producing wins via consistent and convincing performances on the offensive side of the ball.
Moreover, some apologists will try 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 was totally in sync with. But, then again, if you look closely into that 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. Plus, a lot of our rushing stats were totally inflated in the first half of the season because of the monster game MJD (again rescuing KD's behind) 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, the question UCLA fans perhaps should ask from time to time - 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.
It begs the question, what the heck is KD doing trying to put in a pro-set WCO, which he has never really been in charge of? Remember he was never in charge of the WCO in Denver. He was not even the Broncos OC or QB's Coach. He was just a WR coach. So we are not even sure he really mastered the complicated WCO in Denver, which masters like Bill Walsh (who invented the WCO!) were not able to effectively implement at the college level. I guess we will find out this year. And, as we have said time and time again, he is not going to able to get away with scapegoating another assistant coach if his offense turns out to be huge flop for yet another season.
GO BRUINS.
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