College football returns tomorrow, and with our model still in development (I really underestimated the time the data validation would take as we try to up our quality a notch), the notes about this week are rather short. There are zero games of obvious consequence (which is why they call it Week Zero, I assume), and the Nebraska/Illinois matchup is more about existential dread than anything else (if Nebraska blows the doors off Illinois and beats up Buffalo in a couple weeks—which might not be that easy—we’ll get a lot of hype for Nebraska/Oklahoma, but even then it’d have to probably be somewhat manufactured hype, so I’m not giving it more than a parenthetical), the most consequential team in action’s probably UCLA.
UCLA had an odd year last year, like everybody else had an odd year but arguably more so. Five of their seven games were decided by one score. They went 1-4 in those games. They won the other two. All were against Pac-12 opponents. It’s hard to glean much from that performance.
The other two Chip Kelly years have been poor. They lost their first five games in 2018, one to Fresno State by 24 at home, en route to a 3-9 mark. They beat Washington State in 2019 in that 67-63 ultimate Pac-12-after-dark game, but Wazzu went on to finish with a losing record, as did UCLA, comfortably.
A thing about Chip Kelly is that he did very well at Oregon. His teams were good. He nearly won a national championship. His recruiting was better than it’s been at UCLA (top-20ish vs. top-40ish), but not leagues better. I’d be curious to see how the rest of the conference compared at the time—was the Pac-12 better? Worse? Was it worse and did we think it was better? Either way, Kelly won football games, and one would think he might still have some of that in him. Is it possible everyone caught up to his offensive scheme? Yes. Is it possible he doesn’t have enough talent? Yes. But it’s also possible he needed a few years to turn UCLA around, and that had there not been a pandemic shaking up last season or had UCLA won a couple more of those one-score games, we could be looking at a ranked team right now. Bill Connelly’s SP+ has them around the top 30. In the Pac-12, that might be good enough to matter.
There’s also the matter of UCLA’s schedule. The Bruins play LSU next week in Los Angeles in a game that, depending how they perform tomorrow, UCLA might be favored to win. After that, they take a week off, host Fresno State, visit Stanford, host Arizona State, and visit Arizona to close out the first half. UCLA might not be underdogs again until they go to Seattle in October, and while the reasonable expectation is not for that to happen, the point here is that UCLA might be consequential, even if they aren’t a true contender themselves.
We’ll see. Connelly has UCLA beating Hawaii by 21. The line’s around 17 or 18. If they struggle, yeah, probably not a team of consequence. But if they win by 40? With no Pac-12 teams in Connelly’s top twelve? Color me curious (though nothing UCLA does tomorrow could or should make any of us legitimate UCLA believers).
