[Viking_Guy]

On UCLA - they've made their living on defense, and to be fair, defenders Dahlkamper and Dydasco are really good.  And their offense does seem to be a straight line through Bywaters a lot of the time - although that's not a bad plan.  The Bruins have had a lot of low-scoring wins - they beat Washington in the 89th minute 1-0.  And they also haven't played a whole lot of quality out of conference - their only two road games out of conference were at UMass and at Fresno State, not the most challenging of schedules.  Their best OOC win is probably Tennessee, who is 14-4-2 but who plays in the SEC, which doesn't seem to have room for more than one football in their minds.  Other than a Florida team in the late 90s, the SEC has pretty much always flamed out in the NCAA tourney.

More interesting to me was their backline's utter lack of contribution to the offense.  Even the long runs forward were sprung by the midfield, for the most part.

I'm just hoping they don't drop the Bruins too far - it would be just like the NCAA to seed them #4 to Stanford's #1, to minimize the chance of two teams from the same conference in the title game.  With previously unbeaten Florida State dropping 2 in the last 2 weeks, I'm thinking Stanford 1 Penn State 2 UCLA 3 FSU 4.

VG

[Viking_Guy]

On UCLA - they've made their living on defense, and to be fair, defenders Dahlkamper and Dydasco are really good.  And their offense does seem to be a straight line through Bywaters a lot of the time - although that's not a bad plan.  The Bruins have had a lot of low-scoring wins - they beat Washington in the 89th minute 1-0.  And they also haven't played a whole lot of quality out of conference - their only two road games out of conference were at UMass and at Fresno State, not the most challenging of schedules.  Their best OOC win is probably Tennessee, who is 14-4-2 but who plays in the SEC, which doesn't seem to have room for more than one football in their minds.  Other than a Florida team in the late 90s, the SEC has pretty much always flamed out in the NCAA tourney.

More interesting to me was their backline's utter lack of contribution to the offense.  Even the long runs forward were sprung by the midfield, for the most part.

I'm just hoping they don't drop the Bruins too far - it would be just like the NCAA to seed them #4 to Stanford's #1, to minimize the chance of two teams from the same conference in the title game.  With previously unbeaten Florida State dropping 2 in the last 2 weeks, I'm thinking Stanford 1 Penn State 2 UCLA 3 FSU 4.

VG