Chip Kelly is back in college football. Here’s why he picked UCLA for his return.

Chip Kelly is coaching college football again after five years away — three with the NFL’s Eagles, one with the 49ers, and one as an analyst at ESPN.

Kelly picked UCLA as his return destination, but he had plenty of other opportunities to get back into the game after losing with the 49ers.

Before the 2017 season, rumors swirled about Kelly maybe returning to Oregon, where he’d built the Ducks into a power before leaving for the Eagles in 2013. Oregon hired Willie Taggart instead. This past offseason, Florida made Kelly a target for its coaching job, to the delight of a fanbase that desperately wanted him. Those are just some of the big schools that were public connected to Kelly. His work at Oregon before going to the NFL meant he could’ve gotten any number of college jobs if he’d wanted them badly enough.

It’s not clear what jobs would’ve been available to Kelly in the NFL. He had a couple of 10-6 seasons in his first two years with the Eagles, but they fired him at the end of a bad 2015, and he went 2-14 in his lone year with the 49ers.

UCLA offered Kelly a couple of ideal circumstances for a college comeback.

Some of that is standard. Kelly is familiar with the West Coast, and UCLA offers natural access to the recruiting terrain he spent time on at Oregon. (Los Angeles might be the most talented high school football city in America.) Kelly’s contract is for five years and a healthy $23.3 million. The school’s Under Armour deal is the richest apparel contract in college sports history, paying the university $280 million over 15 years.

Importantly, Kelly felt comfortable that UCLA wasn’t a total rebuild from the ground up. The Bruins won plenty under his successor, Jim Mora, who had a .605 winning percentage in six years. And Kelly hit it off well with UCLA’s administration.

“I think if you’ve been around long enough, you can trust your gut,” he said. “And maybe it makes you go back and look at your values and vision, and do they match? And I think I was fortunate that I didn’t have to take a job, but if I was going to take a job, it was going to be the right job. And I think sometimes your hubris can probably get the best of you, and [you’ll] say, ‘Well I’ll go there and I’ll just change everything.’ Where sometimes it’s a lot easier when everybody is already rowing the boat in the right direction.”

The college game Kelly left after 2012 is different than the one he’s now rejoining, but UCLA will still look like a Kelly team.

“It really has changed in the last five years,” Kelly said at his introductory press conference. “It’s something that I really think is a trickle-up effect that’s going on in football. I even think what happens on Sundays now has been affected [by] what high school coaches have been doing on Friday nights, college coaches started doing on Saturday, now NFL coaches are doing on Sunday. But I still think the game of football comes down to fundamentals, and ‘can you block?,’ ‘can you tackle?,’ ‘can you catch?,’ ‘can you make cuts?,’ can you do that?’”

College and NFL offenses are highly alike these days. The fast-paced spread Kelly used at Oregon is now the norm nationwide, which is going to prompt Kelly to evolve further.

As for how it’s gonna go:

Man oh man, UCLA’s 2018 season could go in about 38 different directions. Per S&P+, the Bruins are projected to rebound from 77th to 39th despite the fact that my S&P+ projections do not incorporate coaching changes. They return a lot of last year’s defensive production, and the fact that my projections take recruiting into account will always mean friendly things for UCLA.

The Bruins play seven other projected top-40 teams, which is unfortunate, but six visit the Rose Bowl. That, combined with tricky trips to California and Arizona State, creates a schedule with only one totally likely win (Cincinnati), two likely losses (Washington, at Oklahoma), and nine relative tossups that are projected within about eight points. Hell, there are six games projected within fourpoints!

The tiniest developments could make huge differences. If the offensive line holds up, and the defense avoids a sustained visit from the injury bug, UCLA could win most of these close games and rebound to 8-4 or even better. If Azzinaro can’t get all of his chess pieces arranged, the OL struggles, or Kelly can’t home in on his QB of choice, then the floor is low.

Because of Kelly, UCLA was assured of being one of 2018’s most interesting teams in the country. Throw in a schedule that teases weekly drama, and the Bruins rise toward the top of the list.