SMQB: Oregon Outplayed Bruins Due to Talent Gap Created by Poor Recruiting

UCLA needs to use this year's successes to improve recruiting results.

Chip Kelly needs to capitalize on UCLA’s successes this year by improving the Bruins’ high school recruiting. (Photo Credit: Shayne Smith/uclabruins.com)

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Let’s start out today with yesterday’s postgame press conferences.

First up is Chip Kelly. Kelly admitted that the defense didn’t get the stops that they needed to get. Now, he is fond of saying that you play the way you practice and, after the game, Kelly said:

I thought we practiced real well all week and our defense has been really good all year. Again, I think sometimes you have to give credit to the other team.

To be sure, Oregon deserves credit for being better prepared and executing better than the Bruins yesterday for sure.

Chip Kelly’s full interview coms courtesy of Brandon Hoffman from 247Sports.com.

Stephan Blaylock and Dorian Thompson-Robinson also met with the media after the game. Blaylock explained what happened when Oregon had the ball pretty simply:

They were just having their way, at the end of the day.

DTR discussed the missed opportunities that stalled UCLA’s drives and led to field goals instead of touchdowns. He said:

I think there were some self-inflicted plays throughout various drives that kind of hurt us a little bit, especially at the beginning of the game getting a lot of those field goals.

Both of those statements from Blaylock and DTR are valid assessments.

Here are the players’ complete interviews also from Brandon Huffman of 247Sports.com:

But Chip also mentioned how Dan Lanning had inherited “several top ten recruiting classes” from Mario Cristobal.

In the end yesterday, that was likely the big difference as the Bruin defense was just overmatched by the Duck offense.

And, the bottom line is that UCLA’s recruiting under Chip Kelly has absolutely cratered.

Another assessment which I think is pretty accurate is that everyone expected the Bruins to win their first four games. And, after the first four games, I’m not sure how many people really expected them to beat Washington and Utah.

It would be easy to blame Battered Bruin Syndrome for that line of thinking, but I think UCLA played inspired on both sides of the ball during those two games.

I don’t think that, before the season started, anyone expected yesterday’s game to be a battle between a pair of Top Ten teams and I definitely don’t know of anyone who would have given UCLA a chance of beating the Ducks in Oregon yesterday. Why not?

Because the talent just isn’t there.

For most of the Chip Kelly era, people have been scratching their collective heads wondering why recruiting under Kelly has been so horrifically bad. On one hand, Kelly has masterfully used the transfer portal to fill in the gaps on the roster and to build depth. On the other, if he were getting the job done on the recruiting trail in the first place, he could still be using the transfer portal to fill gaps by bringing in players like he has.

The results of yesterday’s game demonstrate why Kelly needs to do a better job of roster management through BOTH recruiting and the transfer portal. Why?

Because college football teams are filled with 18, 19, 20 and 20-something year old kids and, with the ability to transfer without penalty, talented kids who don’t get the playing time they feel they should will transfer somewhere else. Or, the kids may get homesick and want to be closer to home. Or both. There are a million reasons why kids will opt to leave the school they initially signed with to go elsewhere.

That’s why an effective use of the transfer portal is an important strategy for college coaches today.

But college coaches cannot rely on the transfer portal as a substitute for recruiting high school talent which is what it feels like Chip Kelly has been doing.

Now, if you had the chance to ask Kelly if that is his strategy, I doubt he’d admit it. After all, he is now just 24-26 in four and a half seasons in Westwood. If you were a top prospect, would you want to play for a school that has gone 24-26 over the past four and a half years?

The good news for Kelly is that he will likely move to the plus side of that ledger in the coming weeks with games at home against Stanford and Arizona and a road game against the Sun Devils sandwiched in between.

If the Bruins can bounce back from yesterday’s loss and win each of those games, as expected, that would move them to 9-1, heading into another game where they will face an opponent with superior talent.

In fact, this year’s team can potentially do achieve something which has only been done twice before in UCLA’s 104 years of playing college football — win 10 games in a regular season and they could even win 11 games in a season for the first time.

The only two times UCLA has won 10 games in a regular season were in 1946 under Burt LaBrucherie, whose team went 10-0 before losing their only game of the season in the 1947 Rose Bowl Game against Illinois, and in 1998 under Bob Toledo, whose team went 10-0 in the first ten games of the season before losing the makeup game against Miami and the 1999 Rose Bowl Game to Wisconsin.

To be sure, UCLA has won a total of ten games six other times, but in each of those seasons, they won nine games during the regular season and a bowl win allowed to team to finish the season with a total of 10 wins.

Either way, finishing the season with double-digit wins should go a long way to improve high school recruiting for Kelly and the UCLA staff and the failure to improve on the recruiting trail would mean that the improvements seen this year probably won’t be sustainable longer and definitely will keep the Bruins from moving into the upper echelon of college football teams.


Go Bruins.

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