WATCH: Chip Kelly previews LSU game, matchup with quarterback Max Johnson

The Bruins' coach said Saturday's game vs. the Tigers was their Super Bowl, but that every other game is too

UCLA football coach Chip Kelly talks to the media for the final time ahead of the LSU game, giving a breakdown on quarterback Max Johnson and projecting how Dorian Thompson-Robinson will bounce back for the Bruins.

Ran ball well in opener, expect LSU to try and take that away?

I mean, you have no idea what the other team’s game plan’s going to be, so that’s part of the beauty of football, so you have to obviously come out—we’ll have a plan going into the game and they’ll have a plan going into the game and we’ll see how those two match up—that’s part of the process and 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. There’s been games when I was at Oregon and we played Auburn in the national championship game, it was going to be the highest-scoring affair ever and it was 22-19, you know, so sometimes I think expectations going into the game aren’t how the game expresses itself, so you’ve got to be able to, we’ve always approached it, we have to be a balanced team because there’s going to be times when we run a lot but there’s also going to be times when we’re going to have to throw it a lot and really it depends on not only what the defensive game plan is but what happens in the course of the game—you can catch yourself down early and you’re going to have to throw it a little bit more. If, all of a sudden for some reason you’re up, your special teams made some plays or your defense made some plays and scored some points, then all of a sudden it may turn into a little bit more of a running game, so you’ve got to be able to do both against a really good defense that we’re going to face on Saturday and then we’ll see how the game expresses itself.

Do they have an edge on you having 2021 film?

Um, maybe, but we also have the edge that we got to play a game, so you always hear the analogy that your biggest improvement is from Game 1 to Game 2, so 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. We don’t have any evidence of what it’s going to be like. We can guess about it and look at it, but we’re going to have to make some adjustments early on both sides of the ball.

You know Max Johnson well?

He’s really athletic. There is no game study, it’s the same as the last time we had the conversation because they haven’t played a game, so he’s an athletic kid, he’s played last year, he can beat you with both his arm and his legs, that’s maybe a little more of a factor than the other guy because I think he really has the ability to run the football, so you have to be disciplined in your rush lanes against him. If they’re going to go back to the 2019 form of throwing the ball all over the lot, then you still have to be disciplined in how you rush this guy because he can beat you with his feet also, so there’s obviously a lot of talent around him, but he is truly a dual-threat guy that you have to be aware of that he can beat you with both his arm and his legs.

Marrazzzo progressing?

Yeah, Sam’s doing a really good job and every day he does a little bit more, so we’ll see how he ends up.

Active Saturday?

Today is Wednesday, so.

Dorian has history of iffy openers before settling in, expect to see him more composed this week?

Yeah, I think we expect everything out of Dorian, and the great part about Dorian is he always has played his best in our biggest games, so 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.

So are you acknowledging this is a bigger game?

No, I acknowledged that every game is a bigger game, so as you step up the ladder, the next game is bigger than the other game, so as we keep going—and that’s how he approaches it too, so if he has struggled in an opener then the next game he plays really well in because the next game is the biggest game we play.

Orgeron said LSU is treating this like a bowl game, tough knowing they're preparing with that mindset?

Every game is the biggest game, no. Have you ever seen a coach that says we're not going all out in a game? That's, I don't – we're going all out. This is our Super Bowl and it's their Super Bowl because it's the next game on the list, so I don't know any coach that says 'This game isn't that important.' We put everything we had into our Hawaii game plan and we executed a little bit better than Hawaii executed and that's why we ended up on the upside of it, but we didn't look at Hawaii and say 'This one's not that important, let's get ready for the other one.' It's never gonna be that way, and I don't think you're ever gonna hear a coach ever say that cause that's just not how you approach it. You only get to play 12 games a year, so to put more weight on one game than you do another game, then shame on you. Cause usually if you're not gonna put enough weight on it, probably gonna end up on the down side of it. So every game we play is the most important game we play, so every week is the Super Bowl for us whether it's a conference game or out-of-conference game or whatever, whoever the opponent is. When you only get 12, you gotta take all of them very seriously and we do.

Understand how fans may see this as a statement game?

Yeah, we understand that, yeah, but that doesn't affect how we change things or what we do. Our practice schedule hasn't changed, what our Tuesday's like, what our Wednesday's like, what our Monday's like doesn't change in terms of our approach to how we approach it. You have to be consistent in your approach and how you're gonna handle things. But we understand that we're playing a Power Five team, not a Group of Five team, we understand that part.

Tendencies you've picked up on scouting LSU?

Well it's a brand new defense, so there is no tendencies. So it's a new coordinator that came from the National Football League, so we'll be able to answer that question better after the game. But we don't really have any tendencies going into the game because the coordinator wasn't calling the defense where he came from in the NFL either. So you don't say alright, here's his book, so if you were gonna play against Clancy Pendergrass, well you could look at what he did when he was in the NFL as a coordinator, as a play-caller. This guy has never been the play-caller. So you don't have an idea. But I do know with coach O at the top that it's gonna be a hard-nosed, physical, defensive football team cause everywhere he's been, that's what it's been. So that's what we expect.

How will your O-Line match up with their D-Line?

Again, we'll figure that out when we get to the game. We have not played them, we don't have any common opponents, so you don't have anybody that you said 'Hey, this team that we played did this against them and we really know that player intimately.' So that's the beauty, you try to play in some of these out-of-conference games when there's not a lot of intimate knowledge of your opponent, that's just the nature of the game. Same for them, they don't have intimate knowledge of us cause they haven't played anybody we've played. So everything you do is based off of looking at the tape and the film and trying to project, but early in the game, we're all gonna have to make adjustments, both offensively and defensively, for what they're doing. And same on their side.

O-Line performance in practice?

They've done a really nice job, we've had a good two days, we had a good Monday and a good Tuesday and we're looking forward to putting in a good day of work today.

Appreciate athletic department going all out to create electric atmosphere?

We're always appreciative of our fans. I love our fans. I mean, I think you really, truly appreciate, if you're anybody in college football, what fans are all about after going through what we went through last season. And our first time when we went to the Rose Bowl last year, it was a Sunday morning versus Cal and there was nobody there and it was, no other way to say it, but it was just eerie, it was just really strange. So you love it when you can – it's part of the pageantry of college football that makes the game so exciting is to get the fans back in the stands. We're gonna be excited to get the Rose Bowl packed on Saturday.

Performance against Chevan Cordeiro, prepare you for Max Johnson?

I think our guys did a decent job. There were some times that we had opportunities to get him down, some unblocked guys in sack situations, but we didn't finish at the ball. That's a big point of emphasis for our defensive staff this week, I think we could've got to him a little bit more, but he was a little elusive and there were a couple times where he shook us. But we've gotta come to balance and be able to maybe not make a knockout hit but just make sure that we get him to the ground, and that's really what you're gonna have to do with this guy this week.

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