UCLA’s Defensive Coordinator Tom Bradley watches his team during football practice session on the campus intramural field Wednesday, August 10, 2016, Westwood, CA.
Photo by Steve McCrank/Staff Photographer
Kenny Young can barely believe that this will be his third year with UCLA defensive coordinator Tom Bradley. The time has flown by with Bradley sharing knowledge from his nearly 40 years of coaching with his pupils.
“Coach Bradley’s like Yoda, man,” Young said. “He just knows it all.”
At this stage of his UCLA tenure, Bradley finally does indeed know it all, especially when it comes to his players and his defensive staff. With a solid foundation set in Westwood under the former longtime Penn State assistant, the Bruins are hoping to take the next step on defense.
“The players understand it, they’ve embraced it, they enjoy it,” head coach Jim Mora said of UCLA’s defensive scheme under Bradley. “We’ve been able to add some wrinkles that we believe will help us because our players have a firm understanding of the foundation of what we want to do defensively.”
Young said he’s looking forward to the new tricks in Bradley’s bag, and credits the progression to the growing familiarity with the coaches and players.
“Every starter on the defense, he understands their strengths and their weaknesses,” Young said. “So if I’m not a good blitzing guy, he won’t make me blitz. He’ll have somebody else blitz. But he knows every single thing about us.”
Bradley, an old coach with funny jokes, won his players over with his immense football knowledge, laundry list of former players in the NFL and affable personality. During spring camp, he joked about freshmen Jaelan Phillips and Darnay Holmes not being able to get dates to their high-school proms. He and Adarius Pickett challenged Osa Odigizuwa, a three-time high-school wrestling state champion in Oregon, to a wrestling match during halftime of UCLA’s Spring Game. (Odigizuwa declined.) He even teases offensive players, sometimes asking the quarterbacks during warm-ups if they need popsicles.
It just chemistry, Young said. And there are no short cuts to developing it.
The defensive coaching staff has similar chemistry now also. Despite upheaval on the offensive side of the ball, all the defensive coaches have remained the same for the past two years.
“We can advance faster because everybody knows the way our terminology is taught, so that helps us all be on the same page on that,” Bradley said during spring practice. “Then there’s a trust factor. We know each other, we can communicate better, so when we can stay together, it helps us.”