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

With the lingering issue of Jim Mora’s job status as UCLA Football head coach swiftly and boldly resolved on Sunday with the shocking news of Mora’s firing and buyout, we now move onto the next step that will determine the path the Bruin football program will follow for the foreseeable future: the hiring of the next UCLA head football coach.

Hiring coaches has not been a forte for UCLA under Athletic Director Dan Guerrero. The typical UCLA Football coaching search has gone like this: identify the hottest coach on the market (Chris Petersen, Brad Stevens, et al); leak that he is the main target and go after him; heat up the fanbase with well-placed rumor drops that the negotiation process is going well and that UCLA has a real chance to land its guy; and finally, when the top target eventually says no, make it clear that the search had no Plan B by engaging in a mad scramble to find the first sucker willing to say he wants the job and throw the kitchen sink at that guy (Rick Neuheisel, Jim Mora, Steve Alford, et al).

All that being said, it’s Coaching Search Season and UCLA is in the middle of that circus once more, so it’s time to identify the main possibilities to be signed to lead Bruin football from 2018 on.

Related Story: UCLA Football: Twitter reacts to Jim Mora's firing from UCLA

Because he is option 1-10 at the moment, it seems appropriate to focus on one guy in this article since the job is his if he wants it. We will discuss other coaching candidates in articles to arrive shortly for your reading pleasure.

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.

Next: Why Chip Kelly Won't Take the UCLA Football Job

Why he won’t take the job: Florida, the main competition at the moment for retaining Kelly’s services, has a recent and established national championship pedigree and such a job in the SEC probably presents a better re-launching point for Kelly’s career if he’s trying to end up back in the NFL sooner than later.

Furthermore, Florida’s trustees will rubber-stamp any contract agreed to between Kelly and Florida’s athletic department with no questions asked, while the UC Regents would put up a fight when it comes to a contract between UCLA and Kelly that might present optical issues in a far more liberal state that emphasizes college football far less.

Faculty at UCLA already make it clear that they resent the pay that UCLA’s revenue sport coaches earn because they live in a bubble where they don’t know the value of a top-flight football coach; they’re likely to throw a collective hissy fit if UCLA Football gets near the top-10 of college football coaching salaries, which it would probably have to do to close on Chip Kelly. The money is there, but hopefully the political side has been prepped in advance by the powers that be in Westwood in order to close quickly on Chip Kelly if an opportunity presents itself.

Finally, Kelly is known to put heavy emphasis on sports science and support staff, two departments in which UCLA either has limited or no expertise and funding. The UCLA administration would likely have to agree to Kelly’s many ancillary demands for that kind of backend support in order to win him over and lure him to Westwood.

Next: The Verdict

The Verdict

This is such a natural fit between coach and school that it would be a shame if it didn’t come together. That being said, as previously discussed, there are a lot of factors working in UCLA’s favor in pursuing Chip Kelly.

The ultimate question is this: how fully is UCLA willing to commit itself to winning at the highest levels of college football? If it can show Kelly true ambition in the form of financial backing for the coach, his assistants, and his backend initiatives, then UCLA should be able to land Kelly. If they give him any reason to think Florida will put him in a better position to succeed, then he’s going to be coaching the Gators next year.

Next: UCLA Football: Jim Mora's Time At UCLA Had Run Its Course

UCLA’s history says it will flame out in another big coach hunt and, after a mad scramble, end up with a never-been or retread whose main qualification is wanting the job enough to agree to whatever UCLA offers; the decisive move to fire and buyout Jim Mora before the season ended in order to take a swing at Chip Kelly says that UCLA has heretofore-unseen confidence in its pitch to the biggest name available on the market. It only makes sense to lean towards history in these kinds of situations, but here’s hoping common sense rules the day and both UCLA and Chip Kelly realize they can use each other to make true magic happen at the Rose Bowl.