UCLA’s Defense Doesn’t Rest Its Case

Every week you hear it, another coach talking about the passing of Cade McNown, the running of Skip Hicks.

Of Bob Toledo’s team.

Of Rocky Long’s Defense.

Again and again, there is concern about having three days to prepare after seeing videotape of Rocky’s Horror Picture Show. To get ready for Long’s Legion, for 11 players who seem to have taken on the identity of the defensive coordinator, the guy signaling from the sideline to players who don’t huddle, but instead look with 22 eyes for assignments.

Some coaches would bask in the whole thing. Long hates it.

“I see it as UCLA’s defense,” he said. “I see it as the players’ defense. I don’t see it as my defense. I don’t see it as the coaches’ defense. When the players learn what to do and play with all their hearts, when they are successful, they deserve the credit. I really believe that.

“My identity, to be quite honest with you, is not important.”

Dismissal of its architect notwithstanding, it is Long’s defense, the product of knowledge accumulated away from the bright lights and big football cities. In college as a player at New Mexico. In Vancouver, where he was a CFL defensive back. And at Detroit, of the World Football League, where he “was just good enough to hang in there.”

As an assistant coach in Albuquerque; Laramie, Wyo.; Fort Worth, Texas; and Corvallis, Ore.

Along the way, Long has assimilated ideas from coaches, and he has put together the whole, which confounds offenses and irritates offensive coordinators.

And has helped the 12th-ranked Bruins win six games in a row.

Said Toledo, who brought Long to UCLA from Oregon State a year ago because he had struggled to beat the Beavers with better players while at Oregon: “It’s like trying to prepare for the wishbone or the run-and-shoot in three days. It’s hard, because it’s unusual. You don’t see it often.”

It’s a defense that plays to the strengths and emotions of his players.

“You buy into the system and you buy into him,” linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo said. “He tells you the truth. I didn’t sell out to the team last year, and I didn’t play much. I’ve sold out this year, and I’m playing.”

And playing well, leading the Bruins in tackles for a loss with 12.

It’s an attacking, pressure-packed defense that offers one thing to a quarterback when he’s calling signals, then delivers something else when the ball is snapped.

It’s complex, with blitzes on every play, but always from different directions. Man-to-man and zone secondary coverage.

It’s simple.

The chief attribute of its players is effort, Long said. “I don’t think anything we do is extremely complicated. I think it’s mental effort to learn what to do and physical effort to do it at full speed. If you care enough to learn it and care enough to try hard, it’ll work.”

The defense’s creator is from Alta Loma, a blond Southern Californian who would seem more comfortable on a horse than a surfboard, more at home in places where sidewalks are rolled up at 10 o’clock than in glitzy Westwood.

You have to dig to find this out, because when you ask Long who he is, he tells you what the defense is doing.

He was a two-way player at Alta Loma High, a quarterback at New Mexico and a defensive back at Vancouver and with Detroit of the WFL.

At various coaching backwaters, he developed a reputation of taking subpar talent and creating challenging defenses.

“I don’t know who gives you that reputation,” he said. “Whenever we’ve played good defense, it’s a combination of players who are playing to their ability and are playing within the scheme and with each other. . . . You’re never successful unless you have talented players.

“A coach can lose a game for a team and a coach can make you play poor defense. And a coach can give players an opportunity to play well enough to win a game.

“But a coach has never won a game. Coaches have lost games but never won one, and I mean all of us.”

It’s a telling statement, and one that helps keep him an assistant, something that no longer bothers him. He has had one near-miss, at Oregon last winter, and Mike Riley, formerly of USC, got the head-coaching job.

“I was flattered that they considered me,” Long said. “I knew I was a serious candidate and that it was down to two guys. I had some anxiety about it because of the opportunity to maybe be a head coach, but I wasn’t sure I wanted it.

“I like the job I have. . . . And I think that when you become a head coach, you ought to be 100% sure that’s what you want to do and I wasn’t in that situation.”

Besides, he’s a defensive specialist in the big-points era. Scoring sells tickets, and a coach to whom nirvana is a shutout isn’t box office.

Nirvana also isn’t UCLA, at least not yet.

“I’ll tell you one thing about coach Long,” Ayanbadejo said. “When we were at Texas, and we were ahead something like 36-0 [actually 38-0] at halftime, he was all over us. He was yelling and cussing, ‘We shouldn’t have even given up a first down.’ He was making sure we weren’t going to let up.”

UCLA won, 66-3.

“They scored, didn’t they?” Long said.

“I think we’re always striving to be better. As a coach, you don’t ever want to become satisfied or complacent, so you don’t want your players to be satisfied or complacent. Every week, we’re striving to be a dominating defense . . . and I’m not going to be satisfied until we’re to that point.”

And when they are, it will be Long’s defense . . . except to Long.

“I have an ego, sure,” he said. “I want to be successful and I’m mad as hell when we’re not. And I think we should be successful, and when we’re not it’s got to be at least partly my fault. When we’re successful, it’s a combination of players and coaches working together, and when you’re successful, there are enough pats on the back to go around for everybody.”

Even for the coach, whether he wants them or not.