After dominant defensive display, UCLA moves on to Christian McCaffrey

In holding BYU to just 23 rushing yards on 25 carries Saturday, the UCLA defense finally looked the part of a unit that spent the offseason devoted to stopping the run.

“We wanted to prove to the nation and to ourselves that we’re the defense that we want to be,” said junior defensive lineman Matt Dickerson. “Basically, we were more adapted to what we were supposed to do, and we did our job.”

The Bruins’ job might be much more difficult Saturday, when Stanford and its dynamo of a running back, Christian McCaffrey, visit the Rose Bowl.

McCaffrey, the 2015 AP Player of the Year, is the type of game-breaker who can make an opponent pay dearly for even minor mistakes.

“It’s just imperative up front that we are very patient and disciplined in terms of our gap control,” said UCLA coach Jim Mora. “He’s very, very patient behind the line of scrimmage. As soon as you get a little bit out of whack – you know, you’ll think he’s going one way and you start to shed a block maybe the wrong way, and he cuts the other way.”

Indeed, as the Bruins prepare to host the Cardinal, Mora’s attention is once again consumed by the 200-pound jitterbug that lit his team up for a Stanford-record 261 rushing yards last October.

“He can’t be all of our focus but he has to be the main focus – in my opinion, it’s not even arguable, that he’s the top player in college football,” Mora said. “(Louisville’s Lamar Jackson) would probably have something to say about that, but we’re not playing them, we’re playing Christian McCaffrey.”

McCaffrey has spent the last couple years making numbers like the ones he put up against the Bruins last year seem almost expected. Though he didn’t bring home the Heisman Trophy last year, he set an NCAA record with 3,864 all-purpose yards and posted the top-four all-purpose performances in the country.

“He can do so many things so well,” Mora said. “(He can) carry the ball out of the backfield, whether it’s inside or outside; catching the ball out of the backfield; they’ll split him out and they use him as a receiver; as a return guy.”

McCaffrey, the lone Football Bowl Subdivision player to lead his team in both rushing and receiving in 2015, wears the No. 5 in homage to Reggie Bush, who is perhaps the last college football player as dynamic and explosive as the Cardinal back. Bush and McCaffrey are the only Power Five players in the past two decades to average over 130 rushing yards and 35 receiving yards a game.

When sophomore running back Bolu Olorunfunmi was asked if he had a comparison for McCaffrey, he thought for a moment and then admitted that he couldn’t think of one.

“I don’t know, he’s kind of different because you wouldn’t think a small kind of guy with his frame, the way he runs – he runs kind of like he’s big,” Olorunfunmi said.

McCaffrey is fresh off a dominating performance in Stanford’s 27-10 win over USC, during which 100 of his 232 yards from scrimmage came after contact, according to Pro Football Focus.

Even a 225-pound bruiser like Olurunfunmi is impressed with the power in McCaffrey’s game.

“He hits the hole very hard,” Olurunfunmi said. “It kind of inspires another running back because that’s a thing that we work on every day – just being explosive.”

Olurunfunmi can smile about what he sees of McCaffrey on tape, of course, because he’s not tasked with stopping him.

The onus is on the defense, which spent the offseason gearing up for the strength and physicality of teams like Stanford, to prevent a repeat of McCaffrey’s strong performance in last year’s contest.

“He’s a great player, he’s a really great player,” Dickerson said. “We respect him and we’re going to do everything in our power to stop him and beat Stanford – not just McCaffrey.”