UCLA Football: Will Chip Kelly take the head coaching job?

Chip Kelly

Playing the role of the aforementioned Petersen/Stevens in this year’s coaching drama (but hopefully with a positive result this time), Chip Kelly is the white whale that UCLA Football hopes to land in the coming days. Calling UCLA’s search for Jim Mora’s replacement a “coaching search” is a misnomer at the moment: until Chip Kelly gives UCLA a “yes” or “no” answer, this is a coaching recruitment. There is no search taking place; instead, what is occurring right now is a wooing.

The former Oregon Ducks, Philadelphia Eagles, and San Francisco 49ers head coach is clearly the big prize to be landed in this year’s coaching carousel. Not just for UCLA, but for any school. But UCLA has long been the job that made the most sense for Kelly by far.

Why he’ll take the job: UCLA is just about a perfect fit for Chip Kelly in every conceivable manner. Kelly is known to be someone who immerses himself in the X’s and O’s of football. He doesn’t care for the BS that goes into being a college football coach: he hates dealing with the media, he hates glad-handing boosters, and he doesn’t enjoy recruiting.

Well, let’s go through that list:

1) UCLA is the perfect job for that kind of a personality: rather than living in a fishbowl as the preeminent celebrity in an SEC town, he would be roughly the 53,298th most famous person in Los Angeles working in probably the 7th- or 8th-most high-profile coaching job in Los Angeles. You couldn’t ask for much more for a person known to enjoy blending into the background.

2) UCLA’s boosters might be the least-demanding set of college sports boosters in America: just look at the job security Dan Guerrero, Karl Dorrell, Rick Neuheisel, Jim Mora, Ben Howland, and Steve Alford have enjoyed when they were LONG past their sell-by dates in Westwood. These aren’t people that need to be schmoozed too hard: shake some hands and take some pictures every once in a while and they will firmly be in a coach’s corner.

But this same set of boosters has stepped up financially to bring UCLA into the 21st century, making the coach and assistant pay competitive at UCLA after years of doing things on the cheap and funding a $75 million football facility in the Wasserman Football Center that finally has put UCLA on roughly even footing with other schools in the country when it comes to facilities. Deep pockets with minimal time demands and not-obscene expectations? That’s a dream booster situation for any coach, much less one of Chip Kelly’s prickly nature.

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3) The competition for talent in Los Angeles is SO much less than the annual bloodbath that unfolds in Florida, where every SEC and ACC team invests most of its recruiting resources and even Notre Dame, Ohio State, Michigan, and others outside the South recruit heavily. In LA, even in a down year, UCLA is going to be no worse than the second or third choice for most blue-chip kids who want to play close to home because no one east of the Rockies besides Michigan, Nebraska, and Notre Dame really recruits LA that intently. UCLA Football can dog it and land top-20 classes; with a smidge of effort, annual top-15 classes are regular occurrences. If UCLA is humming though, it essentially recruits itself; even lazy Bob Toledo landed the #1 recruiting class in the country in 1998 and most of that was with kids selling UCLA on themselves rather than UCLA selling itself to the kids.

But all that discussion leads to a natural question: why would UCLA want to deal with someone so high-maintenance? The answer: because he doesn’t have a good track record in college… he has a GREAT track record in college, going 46-7 in his time at Oregon, including a 31-3 record in the Pac-12 conference and a national championship game appearance in 2010-11 in which he was a blade of grass scraping Michael Dyer‘s knee away from winning a national title. At Oregon he was generally an absolute force of nature whose schemes were unstoppable.

Even after departing to the NFL, Kelly was the architect of more success at Oregon than his stellar record indicates, as Mark Helfrich was able to leverage Kelly’s schemes into a Rose Bowl/national semifinal blowout of Florida State and a national title game appearance against Ohio State in 2014. So for all of the talk about Kelly’s flameout in the NFL, his offense still hasn’t been stopped in college (aside from a disastrous 2016 season at Oregon under Helfrich that can easily be attributed to a quarterback apocalypse) and you would imagine Kelly’s year off from the sport has allowed him to come up with new wrinkles to make that offense even more devastating.

Personality aside, UCLA is the clear choice for Kelly if he doesn’t just want to win, but wants to dominate: his offense is proven to be a force in this conference and that was with the lesser talent he had available to him at Oregon, as opposed to the stars who’d want to play for him in Westwood. Nick Saban is not in the Pac-12 blocking the path to the College Football Playoff; instead, his main in-division competition is Clay Helton, who isn’t exactly scaring anyone, and his competition on a conference-wide level includes a coach he’s had solid success against in the past in Jim Mora’s bete noir, David Shaw.

Kelly’s agent also just happens to be a Bruin who is tight with Casey Wasserman.

And finally, and possibly most crucially, Kelly has made it clear he’s very interested in hearing UCLA out, putting a deal in the works with Florida on hold to meet with UCLA officials.

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