Joel Klatt evaluates highs, lows of Chip Kelly’s tenure at UCLA

Chip Kelly made the surprising move to leave his job as head coach at UCLA to become the offensive coordinator at Ohio State. He leaves behind a Bruins team that he coached for the past six seasons, compiling a 35-34 record in that span.

Kelly failed to coach UCLA to a winning season in his first three years at the helm, but turned it around to record at least eight victories in his final three. He capped off his career in Los Angeles with a victory in the LA Bowl against Boise State.

FOX Sports analyst Joel Klatt looked back on Kelly’s tenure with the Bruins on his podcast, saying he believes it was a successful one in spite of some criticism from UCLA fans.

“Did Chip have success at UCLA? I would argue that he did,” Klatt said. “He rebuilt that program in so many ways. He came in and kind of tore it down even further in order to rebuild it in what he thought was the right way and he was doing that. Chip won at least eight games in the last three years. That’s not easy to do, in particular with what was going on in the Pac-12 over the last couple of years. That conference was deep. There was a lot of teams playing at a high level. Chip did a pretty good job.

“People in Westwood would not have it. I got crushed for defending Chip Kelly and saying, ‘hey, Chip’s done a good job.’ Part of this is I also believe that two things can be true at once. I think Chip did a good job and rebuilt that program in a lot of ways so that they can potentially have success moving forward. But at the same time, you could also see that Chip wasn’t long for a head coaching position at the college level. He did not like what the sport had become and what he was gonna have to do to have success in the sport as a head coach.”

As much as Kelly loved to coach football, there were aspects of running a program he didn’t enjoy, such as recruiting. UCLA never had a recruiting class that broke the top 25 during his six seasons at the helm and its 2024 class ranks No. 70 overall and No. 17 out of 18 teams in the Big Ten according to On3’s Team Recruiting Rankings.

That combined with not getting much NIL support from boosters led Chip Kelly to leave UCLA and join the Ohio State staff where he won’t have to worry about those things as much. Instead, he can simply coach the game he loves.

“I don’t think Chip loved recruiting,” Klatt said. “I think that that’s pretty widely known and the rankings reflected that. UCLA historically has recruited at a higher level than what Chip was recruiting over the last few years. All the Bruins fans would agree with that. His success on the field, I thought, was pretty good. I don’t think he wanted to sit there and focus on NIL and the transfer portal and recruiting his own kids and recruiting kids out of the transfer portal. Then trying to fight the NIL battles with fundraising and booster support at UCLA that have traditionally been very difficult going all the way back whether it’s the legendary Terry Donahue or Rick Neuhiesel or Jim Mora or whoever it was.

“It’s always been a place where if I go cover that sport or if I’m around that program, they’re always talking about, ‘it’s so hard here. We don’t have the resources. We don’t have the x, y or z. They built a new facility. I think it’s better than it has been but I don’t think Chip wanted to dive into that world. What Ryan Day is doing at Ohio State, I don’t think Chip wanted to do that. He’s a ball coach. He just wants to coach football.”