Here's A Bad Way To Start Your First Drive Of The Season

Year 2 of UCLA’s Chip Kelly experiment began on Thursday with a trip to Nippert Stadium in Cincinnati to take on the Bearcats. Like any sophomore year, the preseason conversation around the team focused on significant improvement from last year, with some promises of an offensive explosion.

So let’s check in on how the Bruins are progressing with those promises.

That poor butter-fingered guy is sophomore quarterback Dorian Thompson-Robinson, who was named the team’s starter earlier this week. He was lionized as a freshman for being That Guy who told his struggling teammates to pick up the slack when Kelly’s summer workouts were running them into the ground.

Per the Los Angeles Daily News:

Just as last year’s freshmen came to UCLA, they were met with intense conditioning workouts. None of the young players had experienced workouts as tough as these, then-freshman quarterback Josiah Norwood remembers. Some players started complaining. Another stepped in front of the group of freshmen.

If they wanted to be great – if they wanted UCLA to be great – they needed to pick up the energy, Dorian Thompson-Robinson implored. It was just the second day of summer workouts.

Regardless of his brown-nosing, it’s still got to suck to have such an embarrassing moment blasted on national television in this way. Maybe it wouldn’t have happened if he had just worked out harder.