UCLA Football Recruiting: Chip Kelly Discusses Bruins’ 2020 Class

UCLA Bruins head coach Chip Kelly met with the media after all of the National Letters of Intent were all in from the Bruins’ 2020 recruiting class.

Overall, Kelly spoke about linebacker as being UCLA’s biggest position of need this year. Anyone who has watched UCLA football on a regular basis knows this has been the case, although it didn’t seem to be as big of a need after this season as it did after last season. Regardless, this class bolsters the Bruins’ numbers at linebacker.

He also spoke about the fact that the team is losing just one offensive lineman in Boss Tagaloa, but they added two guys. Kelly feels that it gets the team to where he wants it to be as far as the overall number of offensive lineman. He also mentioned that Siale Liku will be shifting from the defensive line to the offensive line.

While the addition of four-star linebacker Damian Sellers was a surprise to Bruin fans yesterday, Kelly intimated that the coaching staff knew Sellers was on board for a while before yesterday. He said, “We had known about that for a while but, again, that’s the cool part of this day is they get to have the day for themselves and we were really excited.”

That’s also because colleges and their staffs cannot talk about a specific recruit until they have signed a National Letter of Intent.

One other topic which came up was the state of the coaching staff. Kelly, who typically plays his cards close to his vest, did not indicate that any changes were coming and, in fact, made it sound like there are not. Of course, there are ways to make it look like a change is coming from a coach, rather than firing him. For instance, a coach could “choose to leave” for another job but, behind the scenes, a guy may be “encouraged” to do so. So, we’ll leave that discussion for the days and weeks ahead.

Here’s Kelly’s complete press conference from yesterday, courtesy of UCLA Athletics.

Overall, UCLA signed 17 new football recruits yesterday. Here’s the complete list along with four recruits who had committed to UCLA but remained unsigned at this point.

Now, that means two of the seventeen recruits can be considered “blue chip” recruits, either a four-star or five-star recruit. That means that over two recruiting classes Chip Kelly’s two-year Blue-Chip Ratio is now at 8.33%.

Of course, that is subject to change between now and February as there are other recruits who could join the class. But most of the class is in at this point and that two-year ratio isn’t going to change much, even if the number of blue chip recruits in this class doubles. That doesn’t bode well for UCLA’s chances of getting to the College Football Playoff any time in the near future. In fact, it pretty much rules it out for the duration of Chip Kelly’s entire contract, which means that, barring an absolute miracle on Kelly’s part next season, we are now entering what is likely to be the final year of Chip Kelly at UCLA.

I may not be here at this time next year to keep writing about it, but feel free to refer back to this article as one of the earliest predictions of Kelly’s future in Westwood.


Go Bruins.