UCLA football welcomes LSU to Rose Bowl amid uncertainty, disaster
The Bruins' season is already underway, but the Tigers' is just beginning.
UCLA football (1-0) will play host to No. 16 LSU at the Rose Bowl on Saturday. The Bruins have already gotten their legs under them in a 44-10 win over Hawaii last week, while the Tigers will be playing their season opener in Pasadena.
As a result, LSU's coaching staff has a full 60 minutes of game film on UCLA with their current personnel and playbook. The Bruins, on the other hand, do not have a single second of game film from the Tigers from the past eight months, which could cause problems considering coach Ed Orgeron has hired two new coordinators and lost seven players to the NFL Draft in that time.
Coach Chip Kelly sees the imbalance as an even tradeoff, however, considering UCLA pulled several key lessons out of Week 0.
"We also have the edge that we got to play a game," Kelly said. "There’s a lot of things that we need to clean up from Game 1, but we wouldn’t know about that until we played Game 1, so there’s pluses and minuses both ways. There is unknown on our side because they do have new coordinators on both sides of the ball, so will we get what we expect to get? I don’t know."
One of those areas in need of improvement, surely, is the passing game.
Quarterback Dorian Thompson-Robinson was just 10-of-20 through the air with 130 yards. The past two years, Thompson-Robinson posted his worst full-game passer rating in the season opener, so if historical trends are any sign, he won't dip below 121.1 for the remainder of 2021.
Kelly certainly has faith that his signal-caller will step up, even going against a ranked SEC opponent with one of the top-ranked cornerbacks to come through college football in the past several years, Derek Stingley.
"We expect everything out of Dorian, and the great part about Dorian is he always has played his best in our biggest games," Kelly said. "When you look at some of the bigger games we’ve played the last couple of years, he’s always been really good in those games, and we’ll need him to be good against a really good team on Saturday."
Thompson-Robinson recognized how difficult it will be to get back on the same page of his receivers while also dealing with Stingley and Eli Ricks on the outside, but said he trusted in his ability to turn things around quickly.
"(Stingley is) very physical, ball hawk, has very good ball skills, covers real well and just knows how to play defensive back pretty well," Thompson-Robinson said. "Like I said, we've got our work cut out for us, him and Rex on the other side, probably gonna be the best secondary we play all year, so if we stay with our assignment and execute on the ball, we'll be alright."
While Thompson-Robinson didn't put up his best numbers, the Bruins running backs did. Michigan transfer Zach Charbonnet and Brittain Brown combined to rush for 184 yards and four touchdowns against the Rainbow Warriors.
LSU allowed 323 passing yards and 169.1 rushing yards per game in 2020, ranking No. 14 and No. 9 in the SEC in those respective categories. That sets Thompson-Robinson, Charbonnet and Brown all up for big days on paper, but how their performances will come together on the field has yet to be determined.
"You have no idea what the other team’s game plan’s going to be, so that’s part of the beauty of football," Kelly said. "I’ve been in games where you say, 'Hey, we’re going to run the ball,' and then we end up throwing it 60 times because what happened during the course of the game dictates what the play calls end up being and that’s part of how the game itself expresses itself."
Complications of Hurricane Ida
As the Tigers tried to prepare for their season opener, Mother Nature had other plans.
LSU was forced out of its practice facilities when Hurricane Ida swept through the Southeast on Sunday, and the team was forced to relocate to Houston for game week.
“I think it was Friday morning when we heard the Hurricane was coming,” Orgeron said. “As you know, it came up fast. … The thoughts were if we stayed in Baton Rouge, our players were going to be in harm’s way. … We definitely needed the opportunity to get our players safe and to be able to practice.”
Orgeron said several players and their families had been displaced because of the storm.
While Ida was not as deadly or damaging as Hurricane Katrina, Kelly pointed out the parallels between the two storms when he spoke to the media Monday.
"Our thoughts and prayers go out to the people of Louisiana and it’s a lot bigger than football, what they’re going through," Kelly said. "I hope everybody’s safe down there and I feel for Coach O and the team. They moved, but they had to leave their families back there, so it’s a difficult situation for anybody to be put in."
As part of LSU's modified schedule, Orgeron is taking his team to visit the Rose Bowl on Friday. In his short stint as USC's head coach, Orgeron never played the Bruins in the historic stadium, instead losing his only game versus UCLA at the Coliseum – one of the main reasons he was not invited back to hold the position full time.
Now, Orgeron returns with a new team, one UCLA has never played before, reeling from a natural disaster that has thrown its preparation out of whack.
Whether or not the Tigers are able to overcome those obstacles and hold their own against the Bruins will be determined Saturday night when the game kicks off at 5:30 p.m.
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