The ground game: what every casual football fan hates, what every couch coach LARPer pretends they understand and what every dad wishes their son’s team would focus more on.
For UCLA football, the ground game has been the key to its 4-0 start.
UCLA is averaging the fifth-most ground yards per game in the FBS – second-most if you exclude the service academies.
If omissions feel like cherry-picking, however, UCLA is also tied with Florida for the nation’s lead in rushing touchdowns at 18.
The running back mix of fifth-year Wayne Knight, fifth-year Anthony Woods and senior Jaivian Thomas may be referred to as a three-headed monster, but quite frankly, Cerberus has yet to rush for 315 yards and four touchdowns in a single game – as the trio did against Purdue on Sept. 19.
But after having 2024’s third-worst rushing offense in the FBS and a 2025 ground attack that ranked in the bottom half of the Big Ten, perhaps there was little reason to believe the Bruins’ rushing attack would get better.
Sure, Knight garnered plenty of attention for his 1,373 rushing yards last season – the most in the Sun Belt by 245 yards – but there was no telling how the James Madison transfer’s 5-foot-7 frame would translate to the Big Ten.
Besides, the Bruins have had something of a knack when it comes to having transfer running backs underperform the second they get to Westwood, or even having running backs decline year to year at UCLA.
T.J. Harden put up 827 yards for the Bruins in 2023. A season later, that was down to 506. Jalen Berger rushed for 683 yards at Michigan State in 2022 before an injury-riddled 2023 campaign limited him to five games. With the Bruins in 2024 and 2025, he had just 542 yards across his 20 games.
Thomas had 626 rushing yards his last season at California, before transferring to UCLA and putting up fewer than half that last season.
Woods had 1,131 yards in 2023 with Idaho in the FCS. But after missing his 2024 season due to injury, Woods – then at Utah – made the jump to UCLA. In 2025, Woods saw his carries drop nearly 70% and ran for just 294 yards.
But even after 2025’s 3-9 campaign that saw the firing of coach DeShaun Foster – a former UCLA and NFL running back himself – both Woods and Thomas elected to stay put in Westwood.
“The coaching staff – I feel like they believed in me,” Woods said. “I feel like they brought in the culture to win.”
Woods said the communication, camaraderie and trust built during the spring and summer gave him particular confidence in the Bruins’ rushing attack, adding that there was little friction despite what the merging of returning Bruins, JMU transfers and other new additions might suggest.
One notable point of consistency for Woods and Thomas, amid the flurry of top-to-bottom coaching changes, was Bob Chesney’s retention of running backs coach A.J. Steward.
“It (Steward’s return) helped me a lot because I didn’t really have to learn a lot of new running back stuff like our footwork and terminology,” Woods said. “That helped us a lot for sure.”
Admittedly, Woods and Thomas weren’t in Westwood for the Bruins’ historically poor rushing performance in 2024, but the 2026 team already has 87 more ground yards with eight fewer games played.
But it’d be remiss to think the two returning running backs haven’t forgotten about last season. “Everybody can see the offense is a lot better than what it was last year,” Thomas said. “It wasn’t good last year, but we’re having a great start right now. We got to keep it going, but I’m excited.”
Woods and Thomas were both beat out by senior quarterback Nico Iamaleava for the team lead in rushing yards last season.
On one hand, the signal caller’s propensity to put his body on the line and barrel into defenders is certainly worthy of praise.
“Personally, I like to tell Nico to slide,” Thomas said. “He doesn’t like sliding. He likes to put his body on the line for this team. That’s all you can say about him – he’s a real leader.”
But on the other hand, Iamaleava’s physicality can make even the Bruin running backs – who routinely plow into linemen, linebackers, cornerbacks and safeties – wince.
“I’ll tell him to slide and let us handle the physicality and let him be physical when he has to – fourth-and-1, fourth-and-short,” Woods said.
Regardless, each of the three running backs – plus Iamaleava – all know it’s a collective effort.
They couldn’t care less about who exactly is running into the end zone and being hoisted into the air by an offensive lineman.
Thomas began wearing eye black strips during games this season and writes a phrase on them each game. It’s something he wants his teammates to read aloud repeatedly throughout a given game.
“I write stuff on there, depending on the game, depending on who we’re playing, that just keeps me motivated,” Thomas said. “I look at it before I put it on in the mirror, and then as the game goes on, the running backs reiterate it to me whether the game’s not going how I want it to go, or if it is.”
Thomas added he’s given eye black strips to Knight and Woods on occassion.
At the end of the day, perhaps what Chesney is happiest about is that he has a running corps capable of scoring even if he takes Iamaleava out of the play.
“We just didn’t want him to get hit too much,” Chesney said Saturday after defeating Maryland. “The Wildcat option was something that we could employ and put ourselves in a position where we still could get the same advantage, numerically speaking, but not put him in a whole lot of danger.”
Comments are closed.