BleedGopher
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per ESPN:
Watching the sun disappear behind the San Gabriel Mountains from the Rose Bowl is one of the great viewing experiences in American sports. It's awe-inspiring and during a football game has the rare ability to elevate the moment's sense of importance. Usually, that's a good thing.
On Saturday, though, all it did was magnify the disappointment in the beginning of the Chip Kelly era at UCLA. Even with No. 10 Washington in town, the stadium never appeared to reach half its capacity and when UCLA scored on the first play of the fourth quarter to cut the deficit to 24-17, the student section had already mostly cleared out. The optics were bad; the game felt unimportant. This Bruins team, the students decided, wasn't worth burning an entire Saturday night on.
It was the type of scenario an athletic director expects to avoid by landing the most coveted coach on the market and handing him a five-year, $23.3 million contract.
Those who stuck around saw UCLA play some of its best football of the season, but that doesn't mean much when the 31-24 loss signified the program's worst start (0-5) since 1943.
"We didn't high-five in the locker room and say, 'Hey we got close against a really good team,' and they are a really good team," Kelly said. "I'm not a guy that gets solace in, 'We were close.' That's not us. Close isn't good. Close is bad."
If close is bad, then the first five games of Kelly's tenure have been a disaster. The Bruins have already lost more conference games this year (two) than Kelly did in any of his four seasons as the head coach at Oregon, where he compiled a 46-7 record in 2009-2012 and lost only four games during his final three seasons.
His time at Oregon is what made Kelly such an attractive coach at the college level, so in that respect, it's fair to measure how he performs at UCLA with what he did there. But it's also important to keep in mind the significant differences of the two situations.
In Eugene, Kelly was brought in by a respected head coach in Mike Bellotti and served two seasons as his offensive coordinator before taking the baton. The transition to head coach was relatively easy. He kept longtime defensive coordinator Nick Aliotti in place and made just a few staff changes, most notably adding offensive coordinator Mark Helfrich, receivers coach Scott Frost and defensive line coach Jerry Azzinaro. They had been recruiting specifically to his offense -- revolutionary at the time -- for two years and Aliotti's defense for much longer. It was not a rebuild.
At UCLA, that's not the case. Only two coaches -- receivers coach Jimmie Dougherty and running backs coach DeShaun Foster -- remain from former coach Jim Mora's staff, and even though the Bruins have generally recruited well in recent years, their roster was not constructed with what Kelly wants to do schematically in mind. His track record in the conference and the general excitement around his hiring artificially inflated expectations for what is now clearly a blow-it-up-and-start-again season.
http://www.espn.com/college-footbal...ucla-disappointing-start-figure-change-season
Go Gophers!!
Watching the sun disappear behind the San Gabriel Mountains from the Rose Bowl is one of the great viewing experiences in American sports. It's awe-inspiring and during a football game has the rare ability to elevate the moment's sense of importance. Usually, that's a good thing.
On Saturday, though, all it did was magnify the disappointment in the beginning of the Chip Kelly era at UCLA. Even with No. 10 Washington in town, the stadium never appeared to reach half its capacity and when UCLA scored on the first play of the fourth quarter to cut the deficit to 24-17, the student section had already mostly cleared out. The optics were bad; the game felt unimportant. This Bruins team, the students decided, wasn't worth burning an entire Saturday night on.
It was the type of scenario an athletic director expects to avoid by landing the most coveted coach on the market and handing him a five-year, $23.3 million contract.
Those who stuck around saw UCLA play some of its best football of the season, but that doesn't mean much when the 31-24 loss signified the program's worst start (0-5) since 1943.
"We didn't high-five in the locker room and say, 'Hey we got close against a really good team,' and they are a really good team," Kelly said. "I'm not a guy that gets solace in, 'We were close.' That's not us. Close isn't good. Close is bad."
If close is bad, then the first five games of Kelly's tenure have been a disaster. The Bruins have already lost more conference games this year (two) than Kelly did in any of his four seasons as the head coach at Oregon, where he compiled a 46-7 record in 2009-2012 and lost only four games during his final three seasons.
His time at Oregon is what made Kelly such an attractive coach at the college level, so in that respect, it's fair to measure how he performs at UCLA with what he did there. But it's also important to keep in mind the significant differences of the two situations.
In Eugene, Kelly was brought in by a respected head coach in Mike Bellotti and served two seasons as his offensive coordinator before taking the baton. The transition to head coach was relatively easy. He kept longtime defensive coordinator Nick Aliotti in place and made just a few staff changes, most notably adding offensive coordinator Mark Helfrich, receivers coach Scott Frost and defensive line coach Jerry Azzinaro. They had been recruiting specifically to his offense -- revolutionary at the time -- for two years and Aliotti's defense for much longer. It was not a rebuild.
At UCLA, that's not the case. Only two coaches -- receivers coach Jimmie Dougherty and running backs coach DeShaun Foster -- remain from former coach Jim Mora's staff, and even though the Bruins have generally recruited well in recent years, their roster was not constructed with what Kelly wants to do schematically in mind. His track record in the conference and the general excitement around his hiring artificially inflated expectations for what is now clearly a blow-it-up-and-start-again season.
http://www.espn.com/college-footbal...ucla-disappointing-start-figure-change-season
Go Gophers!!
