In Reply to: The unbeaten #7 football team in the nation posted by ej on November 01, 2026 at 09:00:23
You are a better fan than everyone else? LA people should be ashamed of themselves for not being as good a fan as you are?
You say the excuse are BS, but actually they are the opposite of BS because they are ACTUAL REALITY. I attended games for decades and while early season attendance has always been spotty due to the quarter system, generally speaking, for a quite a while the fans gave a lot more than they were given back, with crowds that were routinely inexplicably large for sh!t product between the quality of play and gameday viewing experience that was provided not only by UCLA but by the Pac12 Commissioners who negotiated for atrocious start times for an ever increasing percentage of the games played.
Karl Dorrell averaged nearly 65K fans per game across his entire tenure, a tenure that was marked by laughably bad management of the program, poor coaching, lackluster recruiting, and generally a crap product on the field. An average of over 76K turned out across his final season when expectations had risen modestly after UCLA's shocking 13-9 win at the mausoleum in 2006. That 76K+ figure is even more impressive when you consider that we played SUC away and the team finished 6-6.
Neuheisel averaged 64K through his entire tenure, with nearly 73K per game turning out in his inaugural season before it steadily declined in each of his subsequent seasons as the product grew increasingly embarrassing, costs of attendance grew as did the university's commitment to the program and quality of the fan experience.
Mora averaged 67K, setting an all time attendance record in 2014 of 76,650, his most successful season at UCLA, suggesting that perhaps there might actually be a correlation between winning and attendance, I know, a crazy thought.
And here's where it really gets fun, Chip Kelly averaged about 45k over his tenure, a tenure during which he eschewed any sort of fan engagement, recruiting, and publicly stated that attendance was not his problem or something he cared about, and his on-field product definitely reflected that. This also coincided with the entire athletic department getting Jarmonded into irrelevance while it continued to wave it's middle finger at fans by also ticket prices, parking and per seat donation fees.
And in the most of his many Jarmondy move, Jarmond's piste de resistance was electing to retain Chip long after he had both publicly and privately given up on the program, only to have Chip wait until after the last second to reaffirm his lack of commitment and willingness to truly F UCLA by bailing to OSU, which the Great Jarmond responded to with his "wonderfully outside the box hiring" of Deshaun Foster, a move that wowed UCLA fans into submission, marking the final straw which broke the proverbial camel's back signaling the final exodus of a large contingent of UCLA season ticket holders that finally decided that enough was enough.
So your suggestion that UCLA fans have always sucked doesn't really measure up to the reality of program that was arguably over-supported as it languished for the worse part of 3 decades.