LOS ANGELES — Rick Neuheisel returned to UCLA in December 2007 with dreams of taking his alma mater – a “scrawny” team with significant financial challenges – to the promised land.
But even then, the challenge appeared insurmountable from the outside looking in.
The former Bruins head coach said his former players, “undernourished” and primarily living off campus, were not fond of the meals catered by Associated Students UCLA. Neuheisel added that the athletic department then didn’t own a kitchen, and its “training table” – a term used for the one NCAA-sanctioned meal per day for student-athletes – lacked compared to other top programs.
He credited Becci Twombley, who became UCLA’s first director of sports nutrition and built the athletic department’s sports nutrition program, with helping set his team’s health back on track.
Not long after UCLA let Neuheisel go at the end of the 2011 season, USC hired Twombley away to launch the school’s sports nutrition department – an all-too-familiar poaching of a rising Bruin to work in cardinal and gold. Whether it’s UCLA Athletics’ nutritionist heading for greener pastures or a case as recent as USC luring defensive coordinator D’Anton Lynn from Westwood in December 2023 – doubling his salary – there’s a root cause plaguing UCLA head coaches (three since Neuheisel left in 2011), Neuheisel said.
“Are we going to try to be a major college football program?” said Neuheisel, who went 21-29 across four seasons leading the Bruins. “If we are, we need to know what major college football programs do, and how they provide for their student-athletes. And if we do that, then we can be competitive because we have everything at UCLA that money can’t buy.”
The firing of DeShaun Foster on Sunday after a bewildering 0-3 start to the season, sends Athletic Director Martin Jarmond back to the drawing board: hiring a football coach for the second time in two years.
“Whoever takes that job, the most amount of power you’ll have is before you put pen to paper and put your name on it,” Neuheisel said. “And you need to ask for everything you can imagine that you need to fight fire with fire with the competition in the Big Ten.”
UCLA Athletics ran a $219.55 million deficit over the past six years, while the university covered its most recent deficit, to the tune of $51.85 million. Chancellor Julio Frenk took over in January after a decade at the University of Miami.
Two sources close to the UCLA football program said Frenk could be a harbinger of change for the school’s lead revenue sport. But academics at UCLA are still a challenge, according to Ethan Young, the former UCLA football director of player personnel from 2019 to 2024.
“It cannot be understated, the level of the bottom of the roster, how difficult it can be because of the academic restrictions,” said Young, who added that while he was in Westwood, a potential four-star commit’s admission status could be rejected a week before signing day, forcing the staff to adjust.
The Bruins last won a conference title in 1998, coming close to a potential national championship game berth if not for a December loss to Miami. UCLA’s last 10-win season came under Jim Mora in 2014, when the program led the Pac-12 in attendance with an average of 76,650 fans at the Rose Bowl (such support came before the NFL returned to L.A.).
Chip Kelly, the head coach from 2017 to 2023, had a 5-25 record against teams with a winning record despite three consecutive seasons with eight-plus wins to end his tenure in Westwood. In contrast, Mora was 24-25 against programs with winning records.
Either way, UCLA was close to conference championships, a sentiment former UCLA quarterback Wayne Cook said he wants remembered, considering the often critical national-media musings over the state of the program.
Cook, a sideline reporter for UCLA’s radio broadcast, points to former coach Terry Donahue leading the Bruins to yearly competitive rosters, something Cook believes can happen despite NIL being at the forefront of recruiting.
The saying, “Los Angeles recruits itself,” might be too good to be true. But in many ways, it has worked out in the past.
Every one of Mora’s recruiting classes ranked higher than Kelly’s – a theme, Brandon Huffman, the national recruiting editor for 247Sports and CBS Sports, said stems from Kelly “ignoring local recruits.” Kelly would show up at Burbank or Burroughs, Huffman said, schools that UCLA was not recruiting players at, and brush off Mater Dei and St. John Bosco, perennial CIF-SS and national powerhouses.
He said Foster had been turning around the Bruins’ recruiting image.
“I think this year’s class, the top-25 class, before the firing, showed that UCLA can recruit at a high level, if you just actually try,” Huffman said, adding that landing commitments from two recruits in Florida was proof of UCLA’s reach. “And that’s something that Chip didn’t do, and it created this feeling that UCLA wasn’t serious in recruiting.”
It’s not all gloom in Westwood. To start, Huffman said one of the biggest misconceptions surrounding the UCLA job – and the program itself – is that the program is not active in NIL.
Revenue sharing has entirely changed how UCLA operates, Huffman said, a thought echoed by Young. During the Kelly era, when NIL was first being introduced and legislated, UCLA’s NIL support was 10 to 15 times below its competitors, Young said.
“I know that’s hard to hear, and it’s easy to point fingers, but the reality is the money just wasn’t there at the time,” Young said. “In the NIL world, we had a budget of hundreds of thousands.”
Young is now a client director at The 33rd Team, a football content platform and consulting firm, which advises NFL teams and college football programs in acquisition and organizational strategy.
The 33rd Team often advises football programs as an extra set of eyes to negotiate NIL or free agent contracts, helping identify the dollar value attached to the player. Young, who studies revenue sharing in his day-to-day, sees it as a significant change for the next UCLA coach.
Now, with the NIL settlement that approved revenue sharing across college campuses, UCLA can dedicate an initial $20.5 million annual cap – likely about $13 million for football – in spending, a budget that helped Foster recruit highly ranked prospects on the East Coast.
“It’s night and day how it impacts the quality of this job, because now you can access departmental funds,” said Young, who wrote a book about college football revenue sharing. “The fact that revenue sharing can maybe not level the playing field, but get you in the same ballpark as other teams, it’s a massive change in terms of the perception of the job at UCLA, and in the upside in what can be done in terms of the caliber of the program.”
Huffman said the next UCLA head coach needs to be “a visible face” to continue to build on recruiting. But regardless of who it is, Cook said, the buy-in needs to be all in across UCLA Athletics.
“Every single person who works for UCLA football going forward, and I’ve always felt this way, needs to 100% believe that UCLA can be good,” Cook said.
Originally Published:
