Sunday Morning Quarterback: The State of UCLA Football Heading Into Pac-12 Play
As the Bruins move into the Pac-12 portion of the schedule, let's look at the status of the football program under Chip Kelly.
Let’s start off today with the video of yesterday’s postgame interviews, courtesy of UCLA Athletics on YouTube.
Let’s start off by discussing yesterday’s game a bit. The game itself was bad. As I wrote after the game, UCLA looked outcoached and outplayed, at least until that fourth down and two play with 2:52 to go.
Had Kane Wommack and Major Applewhite opted to kick a field goal, the Jaguars would have been up by five and UCLA would have needed a touchdown to win the game. If they lined up in an offensive set and run the ball, they may have gotten the yardage they needed and the Bruins may not have gotten the ball back.
Instead, they got cute and called for a fake field goal.
The result was UCLA’s only tackle for loss of the entire day.
Think about that for a moment. South Alabama ran a total of 70 plays yesterday, and just once did the Bruins stop them behind the line of scrimmage. To be fair, the Jaguars had just one tackle for loss goin the other way, but the UCLA defense had a really tough time stopping South Alabama’s offense all day long.
I’m not sure that UCLA would have won if they needed to score a touchdown on the final drive either. The Bruins had plenty of opportunities to get into the end zone with the most notable one being the situation where they had the ball on the one and Charbonnet fumbled. That turnover led to a South Alabama touchdown. That was a 14-point turnaround. Instead of leading 13-10, UCLA trailed 17-6.
The play I personally found one of the most infuriating was the kneel down to end the first half.
If you’re trailing with four seconds left in the half and you have the ball, I don’t care if you’re getting the ball back to start the second half or not. Take a shot at the end zone.
Try.
If no one can get open, have DTR throw the ball away to avoid an interception.
Taking a knee in that situation says that you’re satisfied with where things are in the game and there wasn’t much to be satisfied with at that point in the game.
Looking at the conference schedule, it’s not a reach to say that the Bruins may very well go 3-5 in Pac-12 play, though they will likely finish up 4-4.
I think next week’s game will be a pretty easy win as should the games against Stanford and Arizona State. The two question marks are the games against Arizona and UC Berkeley, which both sit at 2-1 after non-conference play.
I don’t see Chip Kelly beating any of the Pac-12 schools currently ranked in the Top 25. That means losses to Washington, Utah, Oregon, and Southern Cal.
The absolute best I see this team going is 5-3 if they get past Arizona and UC Berkeley. That would mean the team finished 8-4 with one of the easiest schedules in the country.
Now, let’s talk about the elephant in the room: UCLA football attendance.
When the season began against Bowling Green a few weeks ago, the official attendance was the worst ever since UCLA moved to the Rose Bowl in 1982 with just 27,143 fans.
To be fair, it was the hottest game in 22 years against a weak opponent.
Last week, the attendance went up to 33,727 for the Alabama State game. This is still the second worst home game at the Rose Bowl ever. While the weather was better, the heat and the humidity still made it pretty miserable. It seems fair to say that the additional 6,584 fans who showed up last week either were Alabama State fans who traveled well or Bruin fans who came to see the Alabama State Mighty Marching Hornets.
Now, yesterday, against a team that was clearly the best of the first three opponents, the attendance slipped back down under 30K again to 29,344, marking the second week in a row that the Bruins have had their second worst Rose Bowl attendance ever.
How bad is UCLA’s attendance problem? Well, Troy Aikman saw fit to tweet about it yesterday.
It wasn’t clear how long before game time that picture was taken. So, I scoured Twitter and eventually figured out that the picture was first tweeted by Bruin Report Online at 10:55 am, just minutes before kickoff.
So, what exactly is the problem?
It appears to be that nobody seems to care about a mediocre team coached by a guy that nobody cares about. And, why should they?
Chip Kelly has done nothing to create excitement around the program.
He doesn’t recruit enough talented kids out of high school. His recruiting classes have not been highly ranked. His first class was ranked 19th in the nation while his second was ranked 44th. His third class was 31st and his fourth was 24th. The fifth class was ranked 29th and next year’s class is currently ranked 85th.
When asked about attendance after the Bowling Green game, Kelly’s only response was “We’ve won our last four games.” There wasn’t a single word encouraging more fans to come out. It’s as if he doesn’t care if they play in front of a full house or an empty one.
If I want to be really cynical, it makes sense. Kelly gets paid to win football games and not to put fans in the seats. But it’s as if he doesn’t seem to understand that having a packed home crowd to cheer on your team helps inspire your players. While his contract may not reflect this, part of his job is to create excitement around the program and Kelly has created none whatsoever.
To be sure, there may have been a lot of excitement when Kelly was first hired, but there hasn’t been any since, and Kelly hasn’t done a thing to help that situation.
In fact, I’d argue that Kelly has accomplished something not even Karl Dorrell did when he was at UCLA — he has created apathy around the program. At least when he was in Westwood, Dorrell’s inability to get the job done resulted in people hating the job he was doing. Now, it feels like people are just like “meh” when it comes to Chip Kelly’s program. And, that’s just sad.
Speaking of Dorrell, we warned the Colorado fans what they were getting when he was hired. His team may be the worst in the FBS and UCLA heads to Boulder next week.
That should mean that the Bruins will then be 4-0. You’d think that might create a little excitement around the UCLA program, but I’m going to argue that you’re probably wrong. That’s because UCLA’s next home game is a Friday night game and we all now how tough it is to get to the Rose Bowl for a Friday night game. Will the attendance be much better when Washington comes to town? It should be, but at this point, all bets are off.
It’s entirely possible that the Bruins might not break 40,000 until their fifth home game of the season on October 8th against Utah.
As it stands, UCLA needs to average more in their final five home games than they averaged all of last season to even increase attendance at all from last year and 4,000 more than they averaged in conference play last season to avoid having their average attendance drop again. That’s with the team playing an extra home game.
With most fans tuned out of Chip Kelly’s program and the team looking at what seems to be a mediocre record against the conference, that just seems unlikely.
How much longer can this be allowed to go on?
While I’m hoping something changes sooner rather than later, it may go on as long as the end of 2024 when we start getting some of that Big Ten TV money.
It sure does make me wonder how low attendance must sink before the UCLA Athletic department ends Chip Kelly’s tenure.
Go Bruins.
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Does anyone have the mailing address for the So Alabama coach? I would like to send a thank you note for that incredible gift he gave us yesterday. What a wonderful surprise, and it was so thoughtful. He is definitely going on my Christmas card list.
UCLA students and fans are basically treated like the visiting team at their own stadium. First thing Kelly did when he got hired was to remove the team from walking through the fans on their way to the stadium. This was a highlight for a lot of fans that wanted to cheer for, and see the players before the game. Then they move the visiting fans behind the south end zone, where they can be a bigger factor for their team. They also get a better view of the video board than the UCLA students do. When possible the wife and I would take our son and his friends to games and sit in the GA seats. We did this even when we had season tickets. That made it affordable for us to pay for some friends of my sons to attend the game. For some of them it was their first college game attended. Now we don't like to do that, we have to sit next to the fans of the other team. Yes we can go to the north end zone. But as a home fan, why should we have to look behind us to see the replays. UCLA needs to put the visiting fans back to where they sat for so many years, and give the UCLA students and there fans the prime seating areas.