UCLA Football: Defense Looks to “Tackle, Tackle, Tackle”

Let’s quickly catch up with some of the UCLA Bruins’ video interviews from this week. We’ll start with Chip Kelly’s interview from Wednesday morning before practice.

In his interview, Chip Kelly made it clear that Austin Burton will start if Dorian Thompson-Robinson is not able to play tonight due to the injury he suffered last week against Arizona.

In comparing Burton to Thompson-Robinson, Kelly said, “They both throw a nice catchable football.” That almost concerns me having watched Thompson-Robinson throw plenty of uncatchable balls in the early part of the season, but Kelly simply isn’t about to throw either of his quarterbacks under the bus.

We could finally get a really good look at Burton tonight and, hopefully, he plays well and lights up the scoreboard. If he does, it will be interesting to see if Burton “earns more playing time” to use a phrase Kelly is fond of.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday, Jaylen Erwin and Duke Clemens spoke after practice on Tuesday. Erwin spoke about how the team has been competitive and getting better each week. “We just need to make the most of opportunities and just cash in on them,” he said.

“This is going to take one game for us to put everything together and show everybody that we really can do and be consistent with it,” he continued.

Clemens spent most of his time talking about his transition from high school to Division I football and how he has been working to get better.

Finally today, we’ve got Shea Pitts’ interview from Wednesday. Pitts spoke about what the defense needs to do to win today.

“If we are able to just execute what we’re supposed to do and just tackling is the biggest thing...tackle, tackle, tackle...then, they could run whatever they want pretty much, but we’ll put ourselves in the position to win the game.”

We’ll see if the Bruin defense can do that when they host the Oregon State Beavers tonight.


Go Bruins!!!