Deshaun Foster Does Not Deserve What is About to Happen to Him

Foster bleeds Blue and Gold, but that won't be enough to salvage

Deshaun Foster and Martin Jarmond (Photo credit: @UCLAAthletics)

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In November of 2021, I wrote an article at the end of the season asking if UCLA was going to be serious about football. You can go read the article, but the general premise was that Southern Cal had just hired Lincoln Riley while Chip Kelly had just finished a good but ultimately empty season, so were the Bruins willing to do the things they needed to do to show they were willing to compete at the highest levels of football.

This week, we got the answer we have all been dreading: no, UCLA is not willing to be serious about football.

On Friday, the Chip Kelly at UCLA saga came to an end. Chip Kelly was not fired from the school for his complete inability to build a sustainable program in the 2020s but was allowed to spend weeks openly flirting with various jobs until one finally flirted back, leaving the Bruins for the offensive coordinator position at Ohio State. The public dalliances ruined any chances UCLA had at rebuilding its talent level after last season, meaning the Bruins were already going to be a shell of their former selves, and came extremely late in the hiring cycle, meaning UCLA had missed out on a few coaching candidates that appeared to be clear options back in November. It appeared to be one final bungling of Chip Kelly’s ruinous tenure, but at least the band-aid was finally ripped and there were still some quality candidates available.

Martin Jarmond did not go with those quality candidates. Instead, he rehired Deshaun Foster and made him the new head coach.

This article is not about Deshaun Foster, but it should be stated that of the names that appeared on our Hot Board, he was one of the few that we felt would not be a good hire. Foster lacks coordinator experience, let alone head coaching experience, and the vast majority of his coaching experience has come under late-stage Jim Mora and Chip Kelly. Foster’s recruiting ability is suspect, as he was never considered to be an aggressive recruiter but it is unknown how much of that reflects on Chip Kelly, and while he has the support of the players, the fanbase will struggle to look at him as anything other than a continuation of the failed Kelly era, especially if he is forced to keep much of the coaching staff as rumors suggest.

But again, this is not an article about whether Deshaun Foster can be a good head coach or not, because the simple fact is that he is being hurt by this decision as much as anyone else. More likely than not, whoever was going to take over as UCLA head coach was going to face an uphill battle with a depleted roster, and it is much easier to get a battered and bruised UCLA fanbase to accept that a rebuild will take time if the new face is not seen as a continuation of the old regime that left things as a wreck in the first place. Foster will not be given the same leeway that Tony White or even PJ Fleck would have gotten because he was already in the building, and many donors who did not support Chip Kelly may have a hard time supporting him as well. The sheer amount of negative posts in our initial article about the hiring itself is proof enough that many fans wanted a clean break from the prior regime.

Beyond that, UCLA was once again hurt by a public coaching search, one that does not make Foster look like a good choice by comparison. Here is a partial list of coaches that were linked to the job or even reported to have been interviewed:

• PJ Fleck

• Tony White

• Brett Brennan

• Jedd Fisch (the funniest name on this list)

• Tommy Rees

• Troy Taylor

All quality candidates with solid resumes who all would have been decent options at worst. But the fact that we know all this publicly and so many of those coaches had to issue small statements saying they were staying at their current job makes the hiring of Foster look lesser by comparison. Certainly, UCLA did not have the funds to pay for the large buyouts of some of these coaches like Fleck and Fisch, but some of the others were on reasonable contracts that UCLA could have easily afforded, so why were they not hired?

The answer, of course, is because UCLA decided to be cheap. Foster will reportedly be keeping much of the current football staff, a concession to the fact that UCLA did not want to have to pay buyouts on their contracts so that an all-new staff could take their place. By hiring Foster in this manner, not only is Martin Jarmond not giving Foster a chance to succeed on his terms, but is also signaling to the fanbase and the rest of college football that he was ok with the status quo and was unwilling to spend the money required to change it.

And that is maybe the most galling outcome of this entire debacle, and the one on which all UCLA fans can agree: Martin Jarmond has proven he is unfit to be the athletic director at UCLA.

This has been building for a few years now, ever since Jarmond completely mishandled the situation surrounding the gymnastics program in 2021. Jarmond has not shown he is capable of doing the actual work of being an athletic director at the high major level for most of his tenure. Yes, he has a few victories (the Jordan deal, securing UCLA a Big Two spot with the Big Ten move) but his tenure as athletic director has been marred with an inability to “read the room”, as he so eloquently put it late last year. He refused to recognize the shifting college landscape regarding NIL and its importance in creating success in your major revenue sports, instead pushing for donations to the athletic department itself. He is slow to act in all situations, and would rather make a fun Instagram post than answer tough questions. He’s privately fought with Mick Cronin, the biggest positive force in the athletic department during his tenure, while continually supporting Chip Kelly. His donor relations are poor and he loves to take little swipes at the UCLA community that disagrees with his decisions whenever possible.

Maybe worst of all, he has made Dan Guerrero look like a competent administrator when it comes to the football program. The results for Guerrero were not good, but one thing I will say in Dan’s favor is that he could recognize when it was time to cut bait with an underperforming head coach and would be able to galvanize support within the department and donor base to make it happen. He was willing to take a big swing a few different times (Jim Mora, Chip Kelly) because he understood that having a successful football program, or at least one that gave the impression it was trying to do everything to win, was paramount for a successful athletic department. If Dan Guerrero was still in charge, UCLA would not have been hiring a head coach this week; the process would have been done months if not years ago.

But Martin Jarmond is not a competent administrator. He has shown himself lacking in so many regards, and the rumors that his attempt to fire Chip Kelly back in November was blocked by Chancellor Gene Block speak as much to his inability to convince anyone that he is capable than anything else. There is a reason Block has chosen not to extend Jarmond and has left his fate to the next chancellor hired by UCLA, and that’s because he has seemingly lost faith in Jarmond’s ability to do the job. Honestly, it is not a good look on Block’s part that he is letting a lame-duck administrator go forward in making the most important athletics hire he could.

In hiring Deshaun Foster, Jarmond is signaling that he is prioritizing continuity going forward. My response to that is: what continuity is he trying to preserve? UCLA was a middling team last year that only had one victory of note over a Southern Cal team that had completely quit. The defensive coordinator who keyed a complete turnaround on that side of the ball left to take the same job at UCLA’s chief rival and took a few of the remaining quality defensive options with him out the door. There is no recruiting to preserve, and hiring Foster as an attempt to prevent players from leaving via the transfer portal is just another example of missing the forest for the trees.

Deshaun Foster deserves none of this. He has been made a scapegoat by an athletic director who continually failed to manage the biggest revenue producer under his watch, and even now is oblivious to the problems still present. Foster will give this his best shot, I have no doubt, but it is more likely than not that UCLA will be looking to hire a new coach within a few years. And if he succeeds, it will be in spite of the process that landed him the job in the first place.

Hopefully, there will be a new athletic director in charge of that search, because the current one in question should not be allowed to keep his job going forward.

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