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After firing DeShaun Foster, UCLA football has a reckoning ahead

Will UCLA football be relevant anytime soon?

It’s a question worth pondering as the Bruins embark on a coaching search after firing DeShaun Foster on Sunday. UCLA dropped to 0-3 after a blowout home loss to New Mexico on Friday night and were just 5-10 since Foster took over for Chip Kelly in 2024.

Kelly’s departure after the 2023 season for an assistant coaching job in the same conference was a clear indication of the struggles that UCLA was about to face. After leading the Bruins to three straight seasons with eight or more wins, the current Las Vegas Raiders offensive coordinator left to be the OC at Ohio State for the Buckeyes' 2024 national title run.

Foster and UCLA always felt like a working relationship borne out of convenience more than anything else in the search for Kelly's successor. The former UCLA rusher was the team’s running backs coach for seven seasons but had never called plays or been an offensive coordinator anywhere.

Position coaches can become good head coaches, but Foster’s incredibly awkward Big Ten media days appearance in 2024 was probably a sign that he was facing a massive learning curve.

Foster was also an inexpensive coaching hire. According to USA Today’s coaching salary database, he made just $3.25 million in 2024. Only three power conference coaches had lower salaries.

It’s hard to see how UCLA will be able to splurge for Foster’s replacement either. The school’s athletic department has been posting staggering annual deficits in recent seasons.

The school gave the athletic department $30 million in the 2024 fiscal year but that amount didn’t come close to subsidizing a department that had a deficit of over $50 million. It was the sixth straight fiscal year that UCLA’s athletic department had operated in the red and those deficits total nearly $220 million.

The Bruins’ move to the Big Ten should eventually help relieve some of that financial strain thanks to the conference’s massive media rights deals, but that relief won’t be immediate. And it also comes with logistical costs.

There were long road trips in the Pac-12 era, but even the longest trips to Seattle and Boulder are nothing like the road trips UCLA faces in the Big Ten. The Bruins went to Penn State and Rutgers in 2024 along with a trip to Nebraska. This season, UCLA visits Northwestern, Michigan State, Indiana and Ohio State. The shortest of those is approximately 2,000 miles each way.

Those road trips can be a hard sell to coaches and recruits. Especially to a fan base that hasn't exactly filled the Rose Bowl with regularity even when UCLA was winning. Bruins football simply doesn't rank very highly in a crowded Los Angeles sports landscape.

And that's an issue that goes past simple game attendance as well. Many Big Ten programs have far more NIL resources available for recruits than UCLA does.

It's easier than ever to rejuvenate a college football program thanks to NIL and the transfer portal. But the recipe for an immediate turnaround in Los Angeles is lacking a few key ingredients.

By firing Foster now, UCLA has a head start on scouting the head coaching market. But the Bruins are going to need to make a very convincing pitch to their preferred candidates that the program isn't destined to be a Big Ten bottom-feeder for the foreseeable future.

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