It's Done: Chip Kelly To Leave UCLA

The search for a new head coach begins now.

Feb 09, 2024

Chip Kelly in what I can only assume were happier times. (Photo credit: Scott Chandler/uclabruins.com)

Our long (regional) nightmare has finally ended. Chip Kelly is no longer the coach of the UCLA Bruins.

After weeks of openly flirting with other jobs and dragging the UCLA football program into hereto unknown levels of embarrassment, Chip Kelly is leaving UCLA for an offensive coordinator position at Ohio State. A lot of local reporters have been on this beat, but Pete Thamel was the first national reporter to state that the ultimate location would be Ohio State.

Chip Kelly will leave behind a…let’s just say complicated…legacy at UCLA. He will have finished his UCLA career with a 35-34 overall record weighed down by miserable seasons early in his tenure and good but not fantastic seasons in the second half. Kelly took the Bruins to two bowl games during his tenure, with the most recent being a victory in the L.A. Bowl to put him over .500 for his time at UCLA (Kelly also got the Bruins to a Holiday Bowl berth but the game was canceled due to COVID). His offenses during his UCLA tenure have generally been good, with his 2022 offense in particular ranking in the top 10 in the country, though the team did take a step back on offense this past season once Dorian Thompson-Robinson left the program. He will also finish with a 3-3 record against Southern Cal, punctuated by a 38-20 victory this past season that seemingly gave him the life raft he needed to avoid being fired.

That said, UCLA also suffered immensely during his tenure. On the field, Kelly could never really figure out the defensive side of the ball, in part because of his penchant for hiring his old buddies like Jerry Azzinaro and Don Pellum, which led to years of waste while the Bruins were producing a good offense. The team seemingly figured things out on defense this past year under new defensive coordinator D’Anton Lynn, but Lynn would leave the program to take the same job at Southern Cal, either because he recognized the Bruins would be losing a lot of talent going into the next year or he had an inkling of Kelly’s future plans.

You could also point to the on-field results as being a major disappointment under Chip Kelly. UCLA fans sat and endured those first two seasons, where the Bruins won a combined seven games, with the hope that with Kelly’s schematic acumen and talent development, they would be competing for championships later on. That never happened, with the Bruins never coming close enough to sniffing a conference title game appearance, let alone winning the entire thing. During Kelly’s tenure, the conference saw title game appearances from Utah, Oregon, Southern Cal, and Washington during his tenure, with a few of those teams undergoing major coaching overhauls that led to immediate results in the process.

Talent acquisition has always been a sore spot during Chip Kelly’s time at UCLA. Kelly’s strategy of slow-playing high school recruiting and limiting the number of scholarship offers led to recruiting rankings well below UCLA’s historic norm. The opening of the transfer portal provided a major improvement to Kelly’s recruiting, as he was able to bring in more veteran players looking for a finishing school of sorts before heading off to the NFL, but that well would dry up once the full implementation of NIL was established. His current recruiting class has a ranking of 59th in the country, good for dead last in the new Big Ten.

Donor relations was always a challenge for Chip Kelly, with this becoming even more pronounced with the expansion of NIL rights and the rise of the collective era. Kelly never truly embraced the idea of a UCLA collective helping him acquire talent, and the contrast between himself and men’s basketball coach Mick Cronin in this regard is stark. It is not that Kelly was against paying players - he repeatedly took to interviews to argue that the NCAA needed to move in that direction - but he did not want to engage with one of the crucial aspects of his job, to his detriment. Perhaps he felt that having UCLA megadonor Casey Wasserman in his corner would be enough, but enough reports and rumors were flying around that the general donor base was apathetic towards Kelly to recognize that he was not well-received by the end of his tenure.

With Chip Kelly’s departure, UCLA will now look to hire a head coach at one of the worst times imaginable. National Signing Day just went by this past Wednesday (the fact that we did not even bother to cover it should tell you all you need to know as to how it went), and any incoming coach will only have the April Transfer Portal window with which to acquire more players for next year’s roster. Meanwhile, UCLA players are now all eligible to enter the transfer portal for the next 30 days, meaning any incoming coach will need to re-recruit the players already here as their first order of business. The UCLA athletic department is likely not caught off-guard by Kelly’s decision given the public nature of his flirtations these past few weeks, and in fact they put out a release to UCLA fans quickly after the news of Kelly’s departure started to make the rounds. Still, they will have to weigh their options as to whether they want to go with an interim coach for a year or go after a better option. The good news is UCLA ultimately saved on having to pay a buyout for Kelly, which means they should have some money to go after a quality coach if they so choose. I don’t think there is ever a great time to go into the coaching market, but this is certainly one of the least-ideal times to do so. Still, considering the crater being left behind by Chip Kelly, the Bruins really could not afford to sit around any longer and allow the wound to fester much longer.

This will be the first major coaching hire undertaken by athletic director Marin Jarmond. At his previous stop in Boston College, Jarmond let go of the chronically underperforming Steve Addazzio and hired Jeff Hafley, who put up a few middling years at the school. Ironically, it is Jeff Hafley’s departure that is allowing Jarmond to make a coaching hire at his new school, as Hafley left Boston College a few weeks ago to take the defensive coordinator position with the Green Bay Packers. Boston College elected to hire Bill O’Brien as his replacement, which meant O’Brien was leaving the Ohio State offensive coordinator position he had just been hired for, thus freeing the job up for Chip Kelly. Funny how that all works out.

We will provide more updates on this coaching search as it develops.

Go Bruins!

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