There are a number of reports and quotes that show the situation for Karl Dorrell is deteriorating. The mood around the locker room and on the field has definitely been affected. Players and coaches are being asked about Dorrell’s future more prominently than the next game or the next opponent. The MSM and beat press are talking about Dorrell’s status and replacements. Here is a sampling of what’s been going down:
- LB Christian Taylor says speeches don’t work: “At this point, for me, there is nothing to be said. Enough talk. It’s all about, ‘Lets go play ball.’ . . . No one needs a rah-rah speech. It’s doesn’t work. If you’re not ready yourself, you’re not going to be ready.” Dorrell’s inspirational rah rah speeches aren’t working. That right there is a significant breakdown.
- LAT Chris Foster says Dorrell must go 3-0 to keep job: “Their coach’s future is cloudy … Coach Karl Dorrell’s job appears to be on the line, with victories in the last three games — against Arizona State, Oregon and USC — perhaps the only way to earn his way back.” We hope so. It’s not a lock, so we have to keep the pressure on.
- Daily News’ Brian Dohn says Dorrell’s future on the line: “Karl Dorrell’s future at UCLA is a hot topic, but the embattled coach said he has not spoken to his team about it, nor is he focusing on it.”
- Dorrell continually dogged by talk about “status”: “Our players, they want to play. They want to win, regardless of what’s being said, and my status … What’s being said, I really can’t do anything about that.”
- Tom Deinhart of Sporting News talks replacements already: “Two names keep coming up should a coaching change occur at UCLA: Boise State’s Chris Petersen and BYU’s Bronco Mendenhall. And I wouldn’t be shocked if Texas Tech’s Mike Leach becomes a player for the UCLA job if he opts to leave Lubbock on his own accord. But if Mendenhall left BYU for UCLA, would Leach be interested in going to BYU, his alma mater?” Nice!
- Daily Bruin writer Adam de Jung says fire Dorrell: “Barring the most improbable series of events, such as the Bruins winning their last three games and winning the Pac-10, Dorrell will just about certainly be fired as head coach. And he should be … All his answers are cliches, but what more can we ask of a guy who’s probably losing his job soon?” That pretty much sums it all up.
In case you were wondering what the administration thinks about football and Bruin football fans, we have a set of emails (published below) from the faculty representative to the athletic department that might provide some insight. In a show of arrogance, pomposity, and scorn, Athletic Department Faculty Representative Don Morrison tells a Bruin football fan, among other things, to “get a life” and that he “feels sorry for him” for the transgression of sending him an email asking about Karl Dorrell. Nice! Very professional and responsive to the public.
Well Don Morrison, elite public employee that you are, maybe you can explain read more
Last week we wrote a piece on how Dorrell was losing control of his program: players were openly questioning play calling, players were beginning to make “coach’s decision” their pat answer to questions, recruits were decommitting or talking to other programs, assistant coaches were talking to Dan Guerrero about their future behind Dorrell’s back, practices were unfocused and lacked effort, etc. etc. Chris Foster of the LAT today is now pushing that same theory, that Dorrell is losing his grip on the program. He starts off by quoting LB Christian Taylor:
This has stopped being about winning, in Taylor’s view. This isn’t about the Pacific 10 Conference football title anymore. It isn’t even about whether Bruins Coach Karl Dorrell is retained. “At this point, it’s just about playing football,” Taylor said.
No longer about winning … sounds like read more
So it's not just Karl Dorrell who's on the Football 101 kick. Just when you thought UCLA football couldn't get any more odd, Chris Foster of the LA Times uncovers this bit of fodder for the faithful: read more
Why does this feel familiar??!!
This was closer than the final score looks - we looked awful in the second half - for an uninspiring typically mediocre Dorrell win. BYU, were it not for a bad fumble call against them down in the red zone, and a series of bad penalties (11 in total!), could have gone ahead late in the game. And with this coaching staff … does anyone really have confidence that we would have come back and won it? This an ugly win plain and simple. We got lucky. We came out like gangbusters as we expected against a young and inexperienced offense. But we never got anything going in the second half. Nearly 400 yards passing given up to the inexperienced BYU offense now solidifies the fact that our secondary and our defense in general has problems. We have not "grown" or gotten better in that regard at all, even with all our returning starters and seniors. It's a shame too, we should have and could have dominated this game. Instead, we have given every future opponent ammunition to attack us effectively. For all those Dorrellistas out there happy with beating the spread, we have a problem!!!
BYU had 23 first downs to our 16. They had over 400 yards offense (436 yahoo sports) to our measly 235 (only 126 in the air against last years #65 passing defense in the nation, and barely 100 yards on the ground). Training Jay has earned his nickname today. read more
At the rate Dorrell is pissing people off and stretching the definition of integrity and character to murky levels he might leave himself with the slimmest margin for error possible for this season. Today we are finding out that not only did Dorrell screw up the handling of star recruit Brian Price’s paperwork to the NCAA, making Price ineligible to even be on Spaulding Field, but apparently someone in CEO Dorrell’s tight run ship leaked the details of Price’s legally protected private information to a website (we don’t know which site) to explain the hold-up. And that has Brian Price’s father steaming mad and he’s going public with it (Brian Dohn, Daily News):
“I told Coach Dorrell that it’s not my place to deal with the leak. That’s his responsibility,” Frank Price said. “I didn’t really want to deal with the leak. But I did express my displeasure in the fact that, first of all, you dropped the ball with your No. 1 dude, and then you leak information that’s not totally accurate.”
This can’t be good for anybody, especially Dorrell and the team. To face such vocal parental discontent and accusations of a breach of trust and negligence at the start of a special season has to be read more
Now that the first week of training camp is in the books and the drama of the Scott arrest came to its foreseen conclusion, it’s time to get back to discussing football. Robert Kuwada, OC Register, filed an interesting if a little disconcerting report regarding the offense:
“The UCLA offense had more than a few problems last season, converting third downs into first downs being only one. So the Bruins could not have taken much out of the end of the morning practice session on Monday, other than they still need a lot of work moving the chains.
In a situational drill, the Bruins’ No. 1 offense, with quarterback Ben Olson, was 0 for 6 turning third-down plays into first downs.
The only conversions came from the No. 2 offense against the No. 2 defense.
Last season, UCLA ranked seventh in the Pac-10 in third down conversions, making only 66 of 183 (36.1 percent) and the Bruins ended up punting away the football 63 times, the fourth most in the conference.”
Not a good sign. As we said in our Training Camp report, we think the offense is going to need time to adjust, yet again, to a new set of plays. With the 4th OC in 5 years (one who has 0 experience calling plays) and the 4th OL in 5 years (one who appears to us to not be well-liked by the players) we EXPECT the offense to have problems early on. We are less than 3 weeks away from the away game at Stanford. And although it’s only Stanford, this lack of offensive production is a concern.
Injuries, as you know are starting to rack up. Could it be that the grass field not being ready for yet another year is the problem? Hard to say. But there are too many problems already occurring with injuries. Read more about who is out here, here, here, and here. Fortunately, as Dorrell has already reiterated, we have more depth this year than in a long time … his words. No Excuses! Go Bruins!!
DumpDorrell was at Training Camp and we have some things to report. We will start with the positives, otherwise in no particular order:
The Good
- DeWayne Walker was impressive. This is the first time we saw him up close with the players for an extended time. It’s only drills and obviously just Day 3, but we were impressed by how he had his players focused on him and the drills. Of course, 2-a-days have nothing to do with game-planning or play-calling. Beating the spread and shoring up the secondary are still big concerns for Walker, as is the lack of depth on that side of the ball. But we liked what we saw of him up close, which will contrast with other coaches that we will get to later.
- Defense played with nice intensity, speed, athleticism and confidence, measurably more than the offense. They look good!
- The offense is definitely opening up this year and that is great to see. The offensive sets and drills were far more open than last year. Lots of shot gun, 3 and 4 receiver sets, open field passing, down field passing, play action, misdirection. If after 4 years of conservative, sphincter tightening run-run-pass-punt and hails of boos at the Rose Bowl Dorrell hadn’t figured it out then he would be all but signing his walking papers. So no credit to Dorrell for figuring out what everyone else already knew. Credit does go to OC Training Jay, how much … wait until the season starts.
- Kai Forbath is going to be a great college kicker. He had some nice kicks, under pressure. Had some blocked too but we wonder if that was intentional. Problem is Kai still looks nervous out there. He will miss some important attempts, which will put pressure on the offense and our first-year OC Training Jay. Still, Kai may be the next Dorrell All-America kicker.
- Ben Olson looked comfortable out there, and Cowen looked good too. They may not have looked like they are in their prime conditioning and game readiness, but we are going to be solid at the QB position this year.
The Bad read more
Name one coach that has successfully implemented a West Coast Offense in college football?? Waiting … waiting. Exactly. Not one. In defense of his report on the worst coaches in college football in which he placed Karl Dorrell as #5 worst, Sports Illustrated’s Stewart Mandel railed against what he believes to be major flaw for 3 coaches listed in his report: The WCO.
Here is what Mandel had to say:
Furthermore, it’s asking a lot of college quarterbacks to run a full-fledged, NFL-style version of the West Coast offense. It’s just too complicated. At other programs that have attempted it, the typical QB has taken three years to fully grasp it. (UCLA’s Drew Olson being a perfect example.) Callahan has been fortunate thus far to be able to land a juco transfer (Zac Taylor) who’d already been in the system and now a fifth-year senior transfer in Sam Keller. It won’t always be that way. When the inevitable day comes that he needs to start a freshman or sophomore, it’s going to be 2004-05 all over again.
Finally — and this doesn’t apply just to Callahan but to nearly all the NFL-bred coaches in the collegiate ranks today — you do not win championships in college anymore by playing not to lose (as they often do in the pros). It’s a huge pet peeve of mine and a common theme among the worst coaches nominees (see Dorrell, Karl; Gailey, Chan). The strange thing is, Callahan has shown he’s more than willing to break out the flea flickers and other trick plays, but in last year’s USC and Oklahoma games, and when the game was on the line against Auburn, he retreated to all-out, run-it-into-the-line-three-straight-times-and-play-defense mode. I can’t emphasize this enough. I hate that.
So why are there die-hards like Dorrell trying pull sinking ships against the current when there are better options? Some would say that Dorrell is sticking to his WCO so that he can look more attractive for his long-sought-after NFL job. We hope that’s not true and that Dorrell simply mistakenly believes the WCO can work. But there is no evidence that it does over time. With Callahan’s former OC now at the helm of our offense it will not be surprising if we stall during many games. One thing to remember, Dorrell doesn’t have an All-America and best kicker in the country to bail him out (HT to Achilles at BruinsNation).
You read that bold bit of chest thumping correctly. It's on page 3 of the UCLA Football Spring Practice Guide, according to Howland-hater Dennis Dodd of CSBSportsline.com. Our Sports Information Director (SID) Marc Dellins, apparently peaved that Dodd left UCLA out of his preseason 2007 rankings, sent Dodd the glossy guide even before it was ready for publishing along with a note that informed Dodd that UCLA had 20 returning starters from the team that beat SC.
The Bruins are in! You knew that, and you didn't know that. Final Four? Sure. The Spring Top 25? Let's just say I am making Marc Dellins' day. Dellins is the UCLA Minister of Propaganda — they call him the sports info director in Westwood — who was quick to point out that his Bruins have 20 returning starters from a team that beat Southern California.
This is an issue because the Bruins got, uh, well, somehow left out of my first 2007 Top 25 in January. Being the good MOP that he is, Mr. Dellins quickly shipped me the galleys of the spring guide. He apologized in advance for the typos (the bound version is coming). I didn't notice any except the bold prediction on Page 3 about beating USC. Again. By 20. To win the Pac-10. Now that's a good MOP.
Dodd, that perfectionist and detail-oriented nut, recalculated his high precision analysis and, presto, he now has UCLA ranked #9. But we digress. This is BIG. Morgan Center is stating in bold clear language, printed in a glossy media guide they will send out to journalists across the country, that Dorrell will take our football team to the Coliseum and beat USC by 20 points!! AND … and … in doing so Dorrell will have won the Pac-10 championship that he hasn't come close to sniffing as head coach. Well hello EXPECTATIONS!! Might as well call out Carroll and his thugs by name while you're feeling confident. Heck, call out the read more
