Hey guys, thought you'd might like to look ahead to the Rose Bowl tilt. I wrote up some posts about how Walker likes to run UCLA's defense and thought you might find them relevant.

UCLA likes to run the Cover 4 scheme, where they place most of their defenders about 8-10 yards away from the receivers. This way they prevent a lot of deep throws. Here's an example of  Cover 4, where  the corners are playing well off the receivers and conceding the short pass.

What Cal would usually do is focus on the outside corners and let Nate's release be their guide. On this particular play, the Bears ran an in route to DeSean in stride to make sure that he got the ball in place.

One of the reasons Cal didn't win was that our running defense was abominable, we fell for a wide receiver pass gimmick, and our running offense was stagnant--as good as we were at pass protection last year, our run blocking was well below its usual mark. Thus UCLA was able to play their Cover schemes without difficulty on passing downs. When Longshore couldn't prove he could throw deep and the running game stalled, they went to Cover 2 and challenged him to throw into tight coverage or find the open man. On some occasions, he succeeded. On others, he didn't, throwing balls that would have worked better against Cover 4 packages (here are breakdowns of Nate's first and second interception). He couldn't throw the ball deep consistently enough though, so they packed in tightly and UCLA pulled off the win.

So if you really want to beat UCLA, you probably should get that running game going. It's hard to win in the Rose Bowl without bringing their power game to them. It helps open up the defense to the quick strikes you need to win. Also have to keep a handle on their offense now that Norm Chow is there. Hope this was helpful.

(I'm forever in debt to LawVol for upgrading my site design, so here's my way of saying thanks to him and the Tennessee fans.)