Enthusiasm was the third pillar of DeShaun Foster’s three, and to our mind, the easiest to understand in a football context. Discipline is just sort of about penalties and stuff, I guess? And respect, well, that might be showing up on time to things and paying attention (which is also sort of discipline, right? Kind of crazy to have two of your three pillars mean basically the same thing).
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But enthusiasm? That’s easy to understand. Football is a brutal game where you’re hurt basically all year, bruised and battered, and constantly being asked to hit people or be hit by people. If you aren’t enthusiastic to do that, and with a great attitude and a veritable song in your heart while you’re doing it, you’re not going to do any of it very well.
Foster never managed to get the team to play with anything close to that level of enthusiasm – but here, three games into Tim Skipper’s interim tenure as the UCLA head coach, he has the team playing with attitude, belief, and enthusiasm at a level we haven’t seen since maybe the 2022 year under Chip Kelly.