most of the mediots I read leading up to the season opener.
I had mentioned in my 1H Game Notes that JonJon Vaughns was the 'only' UCLA returnee on D that I was thoroughly familiar with. A little hyperbole to point out that UCLA had so few returnees in its 2-deep from last yr which performed decently under Malloe, finishing #40 in Total D out of 130 Div 1 D's (of course, no D'anton Lynn who finished at an elite #10 as UCLA's D Coordinator the season before).
Of the 22 defenders on last yrs 2-deep, a total of only 8 (incl Vaughns) have returned. That's still a draining loss across all 3 layers of Malloe's D in his 4-3-4 sets (albeit Cole Martin got a lot of reps last night in the D backfield as our nickel back.) The bad news is that all three levels of D (DLine, LBers and DBacks) performed poorly against an admittedly solid and diversified UT O.................a balanced & impressively-coached UT O. And, the portal is not going to substantially patch all those holes.
While I expect improvement going forward, that's not much of an endorsement in that UT generated just slightly under 500 total yds of O against UCLA's D. Hard to sugarcoat, other than arguing that UT is a very solid and well coached team.