In Reply to: Re: Chip was bad for UCLA's football business. 1 game over .500... posted by Deplorable on June 26, 2024 at 09:36:28
The factual number was 41,593 average per game in 2022, a full five years into the Kelly "turnaround".
Lower than anything Mora, Neuheisal, Dorrell, or Toledo acheived at their worst. Indeed, Mora had the best attendance season in UCLA history. That factual number was 76,650 average per game in 2014, a UCLA record.
So, Chip's business impact on UCLA football was minus 35,057 fans per game. Even taking your 47,950 average attendance at face value, that's minus 28,700 fans per game.
Using the cheapest ticket price of $50, that's $1,435,000 per game Chip cost UCLA, or $8,610,000 for the season. I take it back. That's not bad for business. That's a disaster!
As for inhereting a team in disarray, Mora had the #12 recruiting class in 2015, #13 in 2016, #20 in 2017, and Mora's coaching staff gifted Chip with another top-20 recruiting class in 2018.
What did Chip do? He spit in the faces of all those recruits, chased them off, and went out and recruited the #40 class in 2019, #33 in both 2020 and 2021, #61(!) in 2022, and #37 last year.
Say what you want about the portal, but that's the worst record of sustained football recruiting mediocrity in recorded history. Fact, not opinion.
Mora's "wilderness years" teams won 18 games from 2015 to 2017, while Chip found his bearings with 10 wins in his first 3 years.
Even Chip's pinnacle season falls short of the best seasons of Mora, Dorrell, and Toledo before him. He surpasses only Neuheisel, another legend in his own mind. All of those coaches are generally regarded as failures by the collective UCLA fandom. It only follows that Chip also failed at UCLA, which is clearly true. It's only when you look at the facts, that you see how monumental a failure he really was.
This has nothing to do with the