UCLA Football: Chip Kelly for Offensive Coordinator?

With the UCLA Football team still looking for an Offensive Coordinator, should the Bruins go after recently fired San Francisco 49ers coach Chip Kelly?

The Chip Kelly experiment in San Francisco is over. Could that be a new beginning for UCLA Football?

It has been a month since the Bruins lost their regular season finale to the Cal Bears, which was followed by the termination of Offensive Coordinator Kennedy Polamalu the next day,

Since then there has been radio silence from Westwood about a new OC.

It has been a little nerve-racking for Bruin fans who are looking for their team to have a complete turn around from their 4-8 2016 performance. The biggest cause of that dismal record was the fact that the UCLA offense could not run the ball in a power-based offense that the football team was not ready for.

The Bruins were based in the spread in the years before Polamalu, which means they still have the personnel to run it. With UCLA being built for that type of offense, it makes sense to hire a coach who knows how to execute it.

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The San Francisco 49ers just fired Chip Kelly as their head coach. In his second stint in the NFL, Kelly went 2-14. This is a year after he was fired from the Philadelphia Eagles after an overall record of 26-21 in three season, with the Eagles going 7-9 in his last year.

So why should the Bruins go after Kelly? Because Kelly is more suited for the college game.

As the offensive coordinator/head coach for the Oregon Ducks he created an innovative uptempo offense that was highly entertaining and hard to stop. In his four years as head coach in Eugene, Kelly amassed a 56-7 record which included 2 trips to the Rose Bowl, one to the Fiesta Bowl and a trip to the BCS National Title Game. Though the Ducks lost that championship game, it is closer than UCLA has gone in the last decade.

On top of being an offensive mastermind, he was also very good at recruiting (something Bruins coaches are struggling with this cycle) and will have a larger market to pick from if he is in LA.

Next: UCLA Football: A Way-Too-Early Look at the 2017 Season

Kelly may want to return to the head coaching ranks, but if he wanted to somehow get back into the college game, an OC position could be good for him to make that transition. Though it is not known if Kelly is on Mora’s radar, but if he not, he should make going after Kelly a priority.