It's the No. 1 off-season topic for UCLA fans. It usually is in any off-season, but it is particularly this off-season.
UCLA football coach Chip Kelly is going into his fourth season, after three losing ones to start his tenure. It needs to be said: that's the first three-year losing record for UCLA since 1962-1964, when coach Bill Barnes went 4-6, 2-8 and 4-6. It's the worse three-year record, then, in 57 years. It's the worse start to a tenure for a UCLA football coach in almost a century, not since James Cline began his UCLA coaching career with two losing seasons in 1923 and 1924.
Kelly is in the fourth year of a five-year contract. The last year of the contract begins January 15, 2022. It's pretty common for college athletic administrations to extend the contract of a coach before he gets to that last year, just for optics. But so far, that hasn't been done for Kelly. A key factor here is that, per the contract, the $9 million dollar buyout goes away in January 2022. So if the 2021 football season is not to the liking of UCLA athletics director Martin Jarmond, he would be able to fire Kelly (contractually in January, but it would informally happen before that) and not have to pay the buyout.
So there's quite a bit riding on the 2021 season. It pretty much is win or else for Kelly.
But how many wins does Chip Kelly need this upcoming season to satisfy the UCLA administration and the fans?
We've been contemplating it ourselves, discussing it among ourselves and with others who are in the know. Sometimes we start to think that eight wins would be sufficient. After all, that's a clearly winning season, which would be Kelly's first in Westwood in four years.
But heck, when we step back and really put it in perspective, and perhaps slip out of our Battered Bruin Syndrome (BBS, for the uninitiated), eight wins just doesn't cut. Eight wins is just that -- "sufficient." Most of the UCLA fans on the BRO Premium Football Forum, when they assert that eight wins is acceptable, qualify it by saying something like "eight wins will get him by," or "after so much losing, eight wins would be great."
You remember the day when an eight-win season was a disappointment for UCLA? When Jim Mora won eight games in 2015, fans wanted him fired. Eight wins did get Bob Toledo fired in 2002. UCLA football shouldn't just be "getting by."
Fans seem to have had their memories clouded a bit by the losing seasons, but folks, UCLA is traditionally a winning football program. The mindset used to be that an eight-win scenario would only be considered passable if that coach had had some clearly successful nine- or ten-win seasons, too. An eight-win season would have been considered a dip, but maybe an acceptable one if that coach bracketed it with at least nine-win seasons on both sides of it.
And seven wins is definitely not acceptable. Not in light of 3-9, 4-8 and 3-4.
One of the biggest successes Chip Kelly has had at UCLA is lowering fans' expectations. But just because a coach loses in his first three seasons, pretty decidedly, shouldn't mean that a marginally winning season is acceptable. We can't let the losing lower the expectations for winning.
I'm not buying this whole explanation about why it’s taken Kelly so long because he had to do some thorough power clean of the program after Mora. As someone who has had a pretty good insight into the UCLA football culture, it just wasn't that bad. Yeah, of course, it needed a spring cleaning, like what all new coaches need to do to a program they're just taking over, but the house didn't need to be razed.
You can also look at it that this wasn't a typical takeover by a new coach. Chip Kelly was going to attempt something completely new and innovative. He was going to not chase after five-star recruits, but go after promising good citizens who needed to be developed over years, who would naturally create a good culture, and Kelly would start a pipeline of bringing them in, developing them and then, by the time the first wave was mature and experienced, the program would be rolling in wins. Okay, even if you accept this explanation, and the UCLA administration at the time certainly did, it's time that the program started its "rolling-in-wins" phase. Heck, if it works, Chip Kelly will look like a genius, again. But if you buy into this explanation then you're buying into that Chip Kelly is conducting an experiment with the UCLA football program. And if, with his most experienced and talented team, the one he's been building to since he arrived, can't have a clear-cut successful season in 2021, then it's clear cut the experiment failed.
Someone could also make the case that all Kelly needs is to get his foot in the door of winning in 2021 and the program will find some momentum that will propel it to bigger and better seasons beyond that. That could be the case, absolutely, especially with Kelly being able to utilize the insta-talent upgrade of the NCAA Transfer Portal. But there simply is no over-looking or looking past the emotional scars -- and financial damage -- caused by a record of 10-21 in three seasons. If this were a civil case in court, the judge would tack on punitive damages for it, and that means Kelly has to pay up with at least one if not two more additional wins in 2021 on top of the compensatory wins.
Really, bottom line: Four years is a long enough period of time for the Kelly experiment. UCLA fans have been reasonable in understanding it, and many have been willing to tolerate 10-21 if it got Kelly to success. But it has to happen within four years. It's too much to allow for a scenario of three bad years, one barely winning year and then maybe the program takes off from there.
And when you think about it even more -- why did it have to be such three dismal, losing seasons to start off? If the experiment was really working, shouldn't it have been a bit more successful than 10 wins in three seasons? Even without elite talent, if Kelly's UCLA program had superior coaching, shouldn't it have been able to wring out more than those 10 wins? There have been other instances where coaches have come in and completely changed the methodology of a program and turned it around, but it didn't drag its fans through three initial losing seasons of hell.
Pundits and fans bemoan that this is an era in sports when coaches aren't given enough time to build a program. All in all, Kelly has certainly been given enough time. There are few other athletic departments in the country with traditionally-winning football programs that would accept Kelly's three-year losing record. The fans and the administration wouldn't accept it. Heck, it wouldn't be accepted at a traditionally "meh" football program. In the bygone era of the 1960s, when coaches were given a much longer time to succeed or fail, Barnes was fired after his three-year losing stint as UCLA's football coach.
Fans will say that it doesn't really matter, though, what they feel is needed in the win column for the 2021 season. What only matters is what Jarmond thinks. That's probably true. But we've heard that Jarmond has set the expectation bar pretty high for this season. Why shouldn't he? We're all a little brainwashed by the past athletic director who seemingly had to see a program hit absolute rock bottom before even considering making a change. If there's anything that has led to the worst stint in UCLA athletics history it was that paralysis and inability to demand excellence. What we're laying out here should absolutely be the criteria for Jarmond, too, not just UCLA fans. And from everything we gather, it is. Jarmond has quite a bit more riding on the UCLA football program than any fan. He needs the team to win and win significantly to turn around the revenue of the program and, thus, the athletic department. So, Jarmond's expectation should be even higher and sooner, given what he needs.
It comes down to this, for fans and the administration: after three losing seasons, it makes it unacceptable to have a marginally winning season. It makes it more imperative to have a clear-cut winning season. Just 10 wins in three seasons doesn't make it more acceptable to then notch 7 or 8 wins in a coach's fourth season. It should raise expectations for wins, especially at UCLA. A coach in Kelly's situation should have to over-compensate for a lack of wins in his first three seasons with more than what's barely acceptable in his fourth season.
If eight wins is traditionally the lowest of acceptable outcomes for a UCLA football season, then Kelly needs to clearly go beyond it in 2021. It's nine wins -- which would be a truly program-changing season -- or Kelly should be shown the door of the Wasserman Center. If we had to fudge, we'd say eight wins and one of them being against USC would just get over the bar of expectation for a satisfying season.
But nothing less is acceptable for 2021. It's time to finally, after three years of lowering expectations, raise it back to what are the traditional levels of expectation for UCLA football.