UCLA football (6-4, 4-3 Pac-12) picked up a 44-20 win over Colorado (3-7, 2-5) on Saturday in a game that resulted in a number of achievements for the Bruins. The victory clinched UCLA’s first .500 or better regular season and its first season of bowl eligibility since 2017. Here are the five main takeaways from UCLA’s bowl-eligibility-clinching win over Colorado.
Impressive … but not really
On paper, this looks like a great Bruin win.
To clinch its sixth win of the season, UCLA scored 34 unanswered points in the second half. The Bruins outclassed the Buffaloes in every aspect of the game in the final two frames, more than doubling their opponent’s yardage output in the second half.
The win also marked a milestone – bowl eligibility for the first time in the coach Chip Kelly era.
Additionally, it broke a three-game home losing skid while setting up UCLA with momentum heading into a matchup against crosstown rival USC.
But for all the good, this isn’t necessarily a quote-unquote “good” win.
Colorado is bad. While any blowout win in a major conference is a difficult feat to achieve, the Buffaloes are one of your easier bets. Six of their seven losses have come by 20 points or more as they have lived up to their billing as a Pac-12 bottom dweller.
And yet, it was this lowly team that had the Bruins on the ropes in the first half, as the Buffaloes were leading by double digits and looked like the superior team after 30 minutes.
UCLA should be celebrating – bowl eligibility is a big deal – but the takeaways from this game should not be overwhelmingly positive.
Still undisciplined
With its most recent bye week, UCLA had a chance to clean up one of its most glaring weaknesses: penalties.
Entering Saturday, the Bruins ranked in the bottom half of the Pac-12 with 62 penalties on the season for an average of 65.1 penalty yards per game. UCLA has committed five or more accepted penalties in every one of its contests so far this season, including back-to-back games of seven or more.
The Bruins were also facing the second-worst team in the conference Saturday, giving them a golden opportunity to correct a mistake that is mostly mental.
After the bye week, however, UCLA still looked like the mentally weak team of old. That was particularly evident in the first half, in which the Bruins had seven penalties for 42 yards.
UCLA cleaned up its act somewhat in the second half, totaling just two penalties for 25 yards. But the damage had still been done, with the nine penalties representing the most by UCLA in a single game this season.
It’s not impossible to correct these mistakes before the end of the regular season, but with only two games left, it looks like this worrying trend is not a trend at all but instead a lack of focus that is stitched into the fabric of this team.
Rushing game reset\
After jumping out to a hot start on the ground in 2021, the Bruins’ rushing offense had gone cold.
Through its first seven games of the campaign, UCLA averaged 219.9 rushing yards per game as Kelly and the Bruins established themselves as the premier rushing attack in the conference and one of the best in the nation.
But the once prominent rushing attack looked vulnerable in back-to-back games against Oregon and Utah, with UCLA averaging just 128 yards a contest on the ground. The once-dynamic duo of junior running back Zach Charbonnet and redshirt senior running back Brittain Brown also looked considerably less dynamic, with the pair of running backs combining for less than 200 yards across the two games.
It looked like more of the same to start Saturday’s game, with the Bruins running for just 69 yards in the first two quarters, putting UCLA on pace for its third-worst rushing game of the season.
Despite trailing by double digits, Kelly clearly made it an emphasis to keep the rock on the ground in the second half and reset the Bruins’ rushing game. After running the ball 12 times in the first half, UCLA tallied 18 carries in the third quarter alone. Charbonnet started to get loose as well, scoring all three of his rushing touchdowns of the night in the final two frames.
Behind it all was senior quarterback Dorian Thompson-Robinson, who was one yard short of hitting the 100-yard mark on the ground for the first time this season.
Kelly has appeared to be more trusting of Thompson-Robinson on the ground as of late, as the senior signal-caller could be the missing piece.
The good, the bad, the ugly: the special teams
In an otherwise average year of special teams performances for the Bruins, they simultaneously saw both the best and the worst performances for the unit so far this season.
The peak came at the beginning of the fourth quarter, when redshirt junior wide receiver Kyle Philips ran a punt back 82 yards. It was a bit of a breakthrough for Philips and the Bruins, who paced the Pac-12 in punt return average coming into Saturday but still had not run one back on a punt return since Phillips did so against Washington State more than two years ago.
The bad and the ugly come from redshirt sophomore kicker Nicholas Barr-Mira. The kicker missed a field goal try from 47 yards out, giving him a miss in four straight contests and dragging his make percentage down to 66.7%. He also doinked the ball off the left upright on an extra point in the third quarter.
Kelly is starting to show a lack of trust in the kicker from that distance, opting instead to go for it on multiple occasions as of late.
The Bruins have to get more from their kicking game, especially if Barr-Mira remains the long-term option at the position.
Lack of energy
One of the biggest complaints around the program during Kelly’s tenure is the lack of energy surrounding it.
In 2019, the Bruins averaged just 43,849 fans at the Rose Bowl per game – a mark that fills up less than 50% of the seats in the stadium.
But after a season with no spectators a year ago, it looked as if UCLA had pumped the program up with more juice than ever before, as fans were coming out to Pasadena in large numbers. The Bruins welcomed in more than 50,000 fans to the Rose Bowl in games against LSU, Fresno State and Oregon.
However, after two consecutive losses – to go along with three straight defeats at home – and the start of the UCLA men’s basketball season over the bye week, one thing has become clear this weekend: the energy is at a season low heading into the home stretch.
Only 36,573 fans showed up to watch the Bruins take on the Buffaloes, the lowest total this season aside from the Aug. 28 season opener that featured hot temperatures, a midday kickoff and a lack of students on campus.
After thousands of students waited in a so-called line for hours to get into the men’s basketball game against Villanova, it’s not clear if there were even a thousand students in The Den at the Rose Bowl come kickoff Saturday night. Many students trickled in through the first and second quarters, but many also left after the team went down 20-10 at halftime.
It’ll be interesting to see if a matchup against crosstown rival USC can help spark some juices, but as of right now, the lack of excitement around UCLA football is alarming.
This content was originally published here.