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What's wrong with UCLA football?

DeShaun Foster walked to the podium at Big Ten Media Days in July of 2024 and seemed like he wasn’t quite sure what to say, creating an awkward echo around UCLA’s new football coach that immediately reverberated across social media.

Foster, one of UCLA’s all-time great running backs, had been thrust onto the big stage at age 44 – literally and figuratively – after Chip Kelly’s decision to step down as head coach last February to become the offensive coordinator at Ohio State.

But what unfolded during Foster’s first appearance in front of the national media turned out to be an early warning sign that something was amiss.

“I’m happy to be here. I’m glad to be a part of this great conference. Um, finally putting two great emblems together – UCLA and the Big Ten. We’re a school that’s won, what, 123 championships so this fits, us being right in this conference, football-wise, which is exciting. You know, um, I’m sure you guys don’t know too much about UCLA, our football program, but we’re in L.A., um….(Long pause)… It’s us and, uh, USC. (Long pause.) We, um… (Nervous laughter, long pause) …. I’m just basically excited really. That’s it. Any questions?”

From hundreds of miles away, a longtime FBS administrator with UCLA ties was mortified at Foster’s lack of confidence and inability to deliver a message about Bruin football’s new era. What should have been a simple assignment had turned into a public relations debacle.

“I felt bad for him,” said the administrator, who spoke to Yahoo Sports on the condition of anonymity. “It was clear no one had prepared him. You’ve got to put him through media training and work the (expletive) out of that until it’s second nature. If you know he’s going to have some deficiencies, you’ve got to fix those. Don’t allow him to embarrass himself because that set the tone for a hard situation in that one press conference.

“All I kept thinking was, what’s going on there?”

It’s a question many in college athletics are asking more broadly in the wake of UCLA’s decision to fire Foster just 15 games into his tenure, igniting yet another coaching search at a school that wins big in nearly every sport except the one most critical to an athletic department’s financial health.

With 12 losing seasons but just one top-10 finish since 1999, UCLA has been one of college football’s biggest underachievers in the modern era. But it remains a tantalizing enigma. How can a school that sits in one of America’s most desirable zip codes, with one of the most well-regarded brands in both sports and academia, struggle so badly to get it right in football?

“It’s a magical place,” said Rick Neuheisel, who played and started his coaching career at UCLA before returning in 2008 as the head coach. “It’s got everything money can’t buy. We just need some great leadership.

“It’s usually something other than inadequate coaching when you have Bob Toledo, Karl Dorrell, Rick Neuheisel, Jim Mora, Chip Kelly and now DeShaun Foster all fail.”

Historically, UCLA observers have directed the blame toward two people: Gene Block, the chancellor from 2007-24, and Dan Guerrero, the athletic director from 2002-20, for not directing the necessary resources toward football success. Though UCLA athletics has navigated funding challenges, operating at a cumulative deficit of more than $200 million over the last seven years, one highly-placed industry source connected to the school said blaming lack of investment in the football program is an easy narrative but not one that necessarily stands up to scrutiny.

"When they hired Chip Kelly, Gene Block was like, 'Go for it,’ ” the person said. “If he's the answer, let's do it and pour the money in. Give him what he and his staff needs. So that's a little bit of a fallacy."

More recently, questions about the leadership at UCLA have focused on athletic director Martin Jarmond, a former basketball player at UNC-Wilmington who rose through the ranks quickly and became the youngest power conference AD when Boston College hired him at age 37. Jarmond's decision to elevate Foster from running backs coach to head coach — and then replace him after a disastrous 0-3 start to this season — has put the sixth-year UCLA athletic director in perilous territory.

Though UCLA chancellor Julio Frenk has said publicly that Jarmond will lead the search, large sectors of Bruin stakeholders have soured on him, sources told Yahoo Sports, citing a distant relationship with donors and inability to put UCLA football on a level playing field with its competitors in name, image and likeness funding. So far Jarmond has survived, including after a Zoom call on the evening he dismissed Foster, with more than 100 former UCLA players and donors, that sources said devolved into finger-pointing and shouting.

In reality, the reasons for UCLA’s descent from power to punchline are bigger than any one person. It’s a multi-faceted story, encompassing the school’s traditional focus on basketball, the inconvenience of playing in a stadium 27 miles from campus, a poorly-timed move to the Big Ten and a cycle of new coaches who never quite fit what UCLA needed in the moment.

“Do I think UCLA is dead? No, I don’t — not the way some people think it is,” the industry source said. “With the right coach and financial support that place can come back with a vengeance. Why? Because it’s L.A., and people want to live in L.A. The brands are in L.A. Companies are in L.A. The media spotlight is in L.A. And the UCLA brand is still phenomenal.”

UCLA's Brian Poli-Dixon is dejected as he watches the celebration on the field at the Orange Bowl Saturday, Dec. 5, 1998 after Miami upset the Bruins by 49-45. (AP Photo/Phil Sandlin)

A loss from which the Bruins have never recovered

The last time that UCLA won so much as a conference championship, Foster was still wearing a gold helmet and football pants. He was a freshman running back on the 1998 UCLA team that opened the season 10-0, beat crosstown rival USC for the eighth straight time and entered December as one of three unbeaten teams jockeying for a spot in the inaugural BCS national championship game.

On the final Saturday of the regular season, the Bruins traveled across the country for a makeup game against unranked but talented Miami. Their matchup originally had been scheduled for September but got postponed due to the threat of Hurricane Georges.

After weeks of worry that the BCS computers might deny UCLA a shot at the national title, the Bruins imploded before the algorithms had the chance. A vulnerable UCLA defense, weakened further by an ill-timed injury to all-conference linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo, allowed Miami to pile up an incredible 689 total yards, 299 by running back Edgerrin James alone. The Hurricanes scored touchdowns on their last four possessions, storming back from a 17-point, second-half deficit to pull off a stunning 49-45 upset.

The week before the Miami game, UCLA’s Black Student Union arranged a meeting between political activist John Carlos and 20 UCLA football players. Carlos and fellow American sprinter Tommie Smith were famously expelled from the 1968 Olympics for raising black gloved fists on the medal stand to protest racial discrimination.

That meeting came at a time when minority enrollment at UCLA had declined after California banned affirmative action programs in public schools. Some politically conscious UCLA football players were frustrated that, as Ayanbadejo puts it, “all of a sudden, the only black people we were seeing on campus were athletes.”

Inspired by encouragement from Carlos, a group of UCLA players decided to make a stand of their own. Led by Ayanbadejo, linebacker Ramogi Huma and safety Larry Atkins, they planned to distribute black wristbands to wear against Miami with a national TV audience watching.

The way Ayanbadejo remembers it, the protest had teamwide support until UCLA head coach Bob Toledo learned of it. According to Ayanbadejo, Toledo would not allow using a football game as a platform for political protest, especially when the message could offend BCS media poll voters and lead them to penalize UCLA.

Did the decision not to wear the wristbands divide the team and distract from preparation for the Miami game? Some UCLA players, coaches and administrators have said it did. Ayanbadejo disagrees, calling it “inconsequential” to the outcome.

“The optics were bad,” Ayanbadejo told Yahoo Sports, “but the intention in our hearts was in the right place and it didn’t affect us in practice or during the game.”

Whatever the reason for the Miami loss, there’s no denying its impact. Toledo never recovered. The Karl Dorrell and Neuheisel eras that followed were even worse. Jim Mora Jr. showed early promise but couldn’t sustain it. Chip Kelly couldn’t come close to replicating his Oregon success. A UCLA program that played in five Rose Bowls, two Fiesta Bowls and two Cotton Bowls under Terry Donahue and Toledo hasn’t risen to those heights ever since.

Neuheisel, in particular, felt the sting of being unable to get it done at his dream job after guiding Colorado and Washington to top-10 finishes. Though UCLA reached the inaugural Pac-12 championship game in 2011 because USC was ineligible for the postseason, a 50-0 loss to the Trojans to finish the regular season was the final straw.

When Neuheisel went to the FOX television set for an interview prior to the game, he was confronted on-air with a report that he was about to be fired. When he asked an assistant athletics director if it was true, “He said, ‘(Guerrero) will talk to you tomorrow,’” Neuheisel recalled.

“That was a shot to the gut,” he said. “We all put on our big boy pants when we take these jobs, but I think the problem is that they really hadn’t financed the expectations they had. Not so much in coach’s salary, but in a way that you’re keeping up with the Joneses.”

Pasadena, CA - Feature photo of UCLA head coach Chip Kelly from the Bruins football game against the North Carolina Central University Eagles at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena on Saturday, Sept. 16, 2023. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

Not changing with the changing times

Eight years ago, after a series of failed attempts to win on the cheap, UCLA sent a message that it was finally going all-in on football.

Over the span of a few months, the school opened a $65 million football training facility, paid a $12 million buyout to fire Mora and pulled off a whirlwind courtship to land the most celebrated coaching free agent on the market.

The hire of Kelly was hailed in the media as “an adrenaline shot for a middling football program.” The offensive mastermind was supposed to bring the same high-tempo, crowd-pleasing attack that he unveiled at Oregon while leading the Ducks to a record of 46-7. What happened instead was a reminder that there are no sure things in coaching. UCLA lurched to a 35-34 record under Kelly while attendance at the Rose Bowl dipped to record lows.

Why couldn’t Kelly take advantage of increased institutional commitment that reportedly included an annual budget for non-travel meals of more than $5 million?

Kelly’s downfall, UCLA sources say, was his discomfort with the car-salesman aspects of a head coach’s job. He was notoriously disinterested in schmoozing with potential donors or aggressively pursuing coveted recruits. As one source with knowledge of the situation puts it, Kelly “believed he could take a 3-star recruit and mold him into a 5-star. So why face the challenges of dealing with a 5-star?”

Those issues became more glaring as NIL became a significant factor in recruiting decisions but UCLA athletic department administrators were slow to react to the changing landscape.

While Mick Cronin’s basketball program is believed to have among the largest war chests in the entire sport, sources told Yahoo Sports that he has taken the initiative to generate most of it and personally cultivated key donations. It’s a much different story in football, where Kelly and some of the key donors who helped bring him to UCLA – including mega-booster Casey Wasserman and former quarterback Troy Aikman — were ambivalent about NIL, sources said.

“They’ll give you $10 million to build a building, but they’re not going to give you $10 million to pay a quarterback,” one person said.

One UCLA insider questioned whether the football program’s NIL spending was even in the top 50 in the nation by the end of Kelly’s tenure. UCLA’s threadbare 2024 recruiting class was ranked second-to-last in the Big Ten, per On3.com. The Bruins were lagging behind again with 2025 recruits before Kelly bolted to become Ohio State’s offensive coordinator.

"The downfall of UCLA football started with Chip Kelly and with the UCLA administration’s inability to recognize his unwillingness to change, his unwillingness to want to change and his unwillingness to adapt to a new world order,” the UCLA insider said. “He wanted it his way. He wanted to mad-scientist the s— out of it and they gave him the keys to the kingdom.”

At the end of a topsy-turvy 2023 season, after Kelly finished by sandwiching an inspirational win over USC with losses to woeful Arizona State and California, UCLA fans flew banners over Westwood calling for his firing. Jarmond stood by Kelly, praising the “strong and phenomenal culture” that the embattled sixth-year coach had cultivated.

Only a few months later, Jarmond somehow appeared to be caught flat-footed when Kelly saw the writing on the wall and pulled the rip cord. On February 9, 2024, Kelly resigned to join Ryan Day’s staff at Ohio State after reportedly interviewing for multiple NFL offensive coordinator gigs but failing to land one.

There was little top-tier talent left on UCLA’s roster when Kelly departed, but Jarmond still appeared to prioritize a quick hire to prevent an exodus of transfers. The athletic director self-imposed a 96-hour deadline to complete his nationwide search. Then he stunned UCLA players by unveiling Foster as their next head coach.

Foster was well-liked among UCLA players after spending the previous six years as Kelly’s running backs coach. Players leapt from their seats to applaud or chest bump Foster when Jarmond introduced him.

But while Foster had the support of the locker room, he had no previous experience as a head coach or coordinator — and it showed. It wasn’t just his 5-10 overall record. He was unsure how to address the media after his first career game at Hawaii in August 2024.

“Do I give an opening statement,” Foster asked a media relations staffer, “or they can just start?”

The missteps continued even as Foster gained experience on the job. He did little to fix UCLA football’s NIL shortfall, one source said. He also severely limited the media’s ability to view practice or interview players during the 2025 training camp and season, shutting out reporters in a misguided attempt to control the narrative.

Ten days ago, after season-opening losses to Utah, UNLV and New Mexico, Jarmond decided he had seen enough. To many UCLA stakeholders, Foster’s firing was more an indictment of Jarmond than a coach who was ill-prepared for his position.

"There’s one constant in all this,” the UCLA insider said. “You have an ineffective athletic director."

Football fans look on in the first half of a NCAA football game between the UCLA Bruins and the New Mexico Lobos at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena on Friday, September 12, 2025. (Photo by Keith Birmingham/MediaNews Group/Pasadena Star-News via Getty Images)

The Rose Bowl problem

Alex Mancini is the rare UCLA football diehard willing to put up with the hassle of journeying to the Rose Bowl to support a losing team.

He willingly endures the hour-long bus ride through Los Angeles gridlock to get to the stadium, the 20-minute walk from where the bus deposits him to his tailgate on the other side of the Rose Bowl, the late-night ride back to campus that feels like a funeral after a loss.

“A lot of people will not go at all or only go for the tailgate or stay for just a quarter or a half to try to beat the traffic,” Mancini, a fourth-year UCLA student, told Yahoo Sports. “It definitely deters some people that it’s such an ordeal to get over there and then come back.”

As recently as 11 years ago, when Brett Hundley quarterbacked UCLA to its second straight 10-win season, the Rose Bowl was awash in blue and gold. The Bruins drew an average of 76,650 fans to their six home games, the 19th-largest average attendance in college football that season and the highest among Pac-12 schools.

Turnout for UCLA home games has steadily declined ever since as the Bruins have slid back to mediocrity and the NFL’s return to Los Angeles has provided more consumer competition. Empty seats at the 90,000-capacity Rose Bowl have often outnumbered fans in recent years. The most densely packed sections sometimes have been filled with supporters of the visiting team.

Photos of a lightly attended Rose Bowl circulated on social media during UCLA’s 35-10 loss to New Mexico earlier this month. One caught the attention of Aikman, who reposted it on X and called the sparse crowd “an embarrassment.”

“Anyone else at UCLA think it’s time for an on-campus 30,000 seat stadium?” Aikman wrote. “Of course, if we can’t play better than we did today, it would be half-empty too.”

More than a half century ago, UCLA attempted to build exactly the type of intimate on-campus football stadium Aikman envisioned. In 1965, UCLA chancellor Franklin D. Murphy and vice chancellor Charles E. Young pushed for the construction of a $6.5 million, 44,000-seat stadium financed by student fees, alumni donations and athletic department revenue.

While UCLA students voted against the stadium proposal, the most significant pushback came from deep-pocketed home owners in neighboring Bel-Air, Brentwood and Beverly Hills — some of Southern California’s wealthiest communities. They were “particularly apprehensive about the possibility of parking and traffic problems on game days,” according to John Sandbrook, who later became assistant chancellor under Young.

Instead of building a football stadium nestled into the hillside just north of Pauley Pavilion, UCLA pivoted to plans for an 11,000-seat track and field stadium that opened in 1969. UCLA administrators explored the possibility of an on-campus football stadium once more in the late 1970s, Sandbrook said, but found no feasible location given that the school has the largest student enrollment in the UC system but the smallest campus by acreage.

“There was no place to put it,” Sandbrook said. “It just never would have worked.”

UCLA football continued to play home games at the Los Angeles Coliseum before relocating to the Rose Bowl in 1982. Opinions vary on how much of a burden the Rose Bowl has been to UCLA football, but the bad optics of playing in front of tens of thousands of empty seats is undeniable.

Though 70,000-seat SoFi Stadium 13 miles away in Inglewood would be a more suitable home for UCLA football in terms of distance and capacity, that’s not going to happen anytime soon. UCLA is locked into its Rose Bowl lease through the end of the 2043 season with no opt-out clause.

That’s one of the issues UCLA’s next coach will have to confront. The next coach will also have to energize a weary fanbase, reestablish relationships with donors, resurrect the NIL program and attract prospects capable of competing with top-tier competition in the rugged Big Ten.

Where could UCLA look?

It could certainly turn to an established retread like Pat Fitzgerald, who is ready to jump back in after receiving a settlement from Northwestern after suing for wrongful termination. An up-and-comer like Syracuse’s Fran Brown could bring some excitement. Or could UCLA pull a rabbit out of the hat like Kalen DeBoer, who won big at Fresno State and Washington but has had a rocky start at Alabama?

Unlike when Foster was hired, the decision on a new coach will not be Jarmond’s alone. Wasserman and Aikman are among those likely to be heavily involved. Already there are indications within the industry that they’ll pitch successful, sitting head coaches with a salary package of up to $10 million and a significant increase in revenue share to build the roster as they attempt to make a program-changing hire.

Though Wasserman and UCLA’s other top donors appear interested in paying whatever it takes to pursue big names, UCLA went down that road during its basketball search in 2019 by making huge offers to the likes of John Calipari and Rick Barnes.

Ultimately, they passed.

While the allure of Los Angeles is strong, it also comes with complications that many coaches simply don’t want to deal with like traffic and the high cost-of-living. That isn’t necessarily a big deal for the head coach, but the average salary for UCLA’s assistant coaches last year was $467,000, a nice living for most folks, but an amount that doesn’t go nearly as far in West Los Angeles as it would in most Big Ten or SEC college towns.

In UCLA’s favor at the moment is the reputation of its new president, Frenk, who played a key role during his nine years at Miami in building up the football facilities and increasing all areas of funding for Mario Cristobal and his staff. Then there’s the UCLA brand and the proximity to so many elite Los Angeles-area recruits.

“Maybe I’m being a Pollyanna, but I still think the upside for UCLA football is immense,” the UCLA insider said.