It has apparently been made official that UCLA has hired Tom Bradley as the new defensive coordinator. Last week, Bruin Report Online claimed that UCLA had made Bradley the front runner for the vacant defensive coordinator position. Due to a necessarily long vetting process, Bradley has seemingly been cleared and is now heading to Westwood to take over the defense in 2015.
Source confirms that Tom Bradley has been hired as UCLA's DC and will be on campus Tuesday. No timetable for a formal announcement.
— Kevin Gemmell (@Kevin_Gemmell) February 23, 2015
UCLA Bruins
One of the big delays in hiring Bradley was to make sure that he was completely clear of any wrong doing or had any knowledge in the deplorable Jerry Sandusky scandal. Because of that, head coach Jim Mora and the UCLA administration wanted to make sure that Bradley was 100% clean, for obvious reasons.
Last season, Bradley was an associate head coach at West Virginia after a two-year stint with CBS Sports as a football analyst. Before that, Bradley spent ten years as defensive coordinator at Penn State in which it was claimed that he was the “architect of one of the best defenses in college football”. Per Bruin Report Online, in his time at PSU, Bradley had the Nittany Lion defense ranked third in the nation in scoring defense and fifth in total defense (in his final seven years).
Last season, the Bruins were third in the Pac-12 in total defense and seventh in scoring defense in former defensive coordinator Jeff Ulbrich‘s first year. With a veteran coach like Bradley now running the defense, expect those numbers to improve dramatically in 2015.