Worth it to get DEN pass?

notaznguy
Tue, 31 Aug 2010 06:44:19 +0000

Our basketball team is currently rebuilding. As imrightuarewrong stated, we do not have any real star players. Many of our top recruits from the year before were actually a bust. For instance, players like Bobo Morgan (left UCLA), Malcolm Lee, and Jerime Anderson did not live up to their hype. That and for some odd reason nobody could understand why, Coach Howland kept playing Nikola Dragovic last year, who was one of the most despicable and laziest UCLA basketball players I have ever seen.

That being said, this season should be better. Guys like Tyler Honeycutt showed flashes of greatness last year and we have some good incoming freshman and transfer. We recruited Josh Smith, the #1 center in the country, Matt Carlino, and got 2 transfers from North Carolina - the Wear twins, who are excellent role players. Malcolm Lee also has more experience under his belt so he should be vastly improved.

As for football, our team should have been a lot better than last years. It’s Neuheisel’s 3rd year as head coach and for the past 3 years he has recruited top 10 - 15 recruiting classes in the country, which is unbelievable for UCLA football this decade. Keep in mind that UCLA football is still going through massive reconstruction. Karl Dorrell, the previous coach, was one of the worst coaches we’ve ever had at UCLA and he did little to recruit top players, which is why UCLA has fielded a mediocre team since the early 2000s.

Neuheisel has been able to recruit some amazing talent that hasn’t been seen around in Westwood for a long time. These guys include Owa, Dietrich Riley, Malcolm Jones, etc. However, these guys are currently freshman and will have less impact immediately, but will have great contributions in the long term. Our current team is pretty good and if you went to the fall scrimmage, you’d see that our team is very capable of offense this year. The only issue is that we are plagued with injuries on our offensive line. Several starting players on the O-line, including Kai Maiva, Xavier Sio Filo, and Stanley Hasiask are unable to play due to injury, academic ineligibility, or other reasons (Xavier went on a Mormon trip for 2 years). As a result, we are using our backup unit for the O-line. They are all seniors and experienced though, however. We’ll have to wait until Saturday to see how well they fare against real opponents.

As for our quarterbacks, Kevin Prince was supposed to be the starter, but strained his shoulder muscles on Day 2 of the fall practice. As a result, back up QB Richard Brehaut has been taking reps with the 1st team. The starting QB won’t be announced until later this week, but it is likely Brehaut will start against Kansas State. Brehaut is arguably better than Prince in terms of precision and arm strength, but Prince has a year of experience under him. Brehaut has never started a game and when he did play last year, it was mainly for mop up duty. Brehaut being at QB is a bit of a concern because he does not have any full game experience. When he played last year, he mainly handed the ball to the running backs or took too long to pass and got sacked. However, Brehaut is much improved this year. If you saw him at the fall scrimmage, he completed 60-70% of his passes, passed for 186 yards, 3 touchdowns, and 1 interception. That’s pretty good.

The running game is questionable. With a questionable O-line, we don’t know what the running backs can accomplish. However, Jonathan Franklin will be our starting guy and for once he is fully healthy. Our running game has been a weak point in recent years. We do have a potentially really good running back in Malcolm Jones though. Unfortunately he is a true freshman and likely won’t see that much time this year. Keep an eye on him in the future.

As for our defense, they’re still our best unit, in spite of the loss of Brian Price and Alteran Verner. Rahim Moore, who led the nation in interceptions last year, and Akem Ayers return as starters and they are beasts on the field. I wouldn’t worry too much about our defense, they’ve always been stellar.

I watch a lot of UCLA football as you can tell. You’ll be hard pressed to find fanatics like me on camps to be completely honest with you. It’s rather sad. I wish there were more people into UCLA football and basketball as me. Most people are just casual fans that only care about the W - L.