In Reply to: Ucla's FB whales are such snowflakes posted by ClockBlocker on September 23, 2025 at 21:43:35
Yes, Chip is quite obviously on the spectrum. Chip was also a College Football Head Coach who was paid $5.6 million a year to do the job of a College Football Head Coach. Being on the spectrum isn't a get of work free card. It also doesn't mean you can't do things. For highly functioning people on the spectrum it generally means that certain things are harder, less intuitive, potentially uncomfortable, and require some extra work and practice to overcome such obstacles. And as a Head Football coach, you lead by example, and Chip's leadership was saying F'It to anything uncomfortable and/or hard, which is perhaps precisely why his teams folded nearly every time things got hard against quality opponents.
Engaging with the media, boosters, alumni, fans is not about being anyone's BFF, it is about representing and selling the program and the experience of being connected to that program to the foundational pieces of that program. You apparently view fans, boosters and alumni as insignificant, ancillary entities that should feel lucky for any scraps thrown their way, which given UCLA's current state is a very curious position to take.
UCLA sucks because UCLA lacks resources and when it comes right down to it, all the "resources" UCLA lacks can be summed up as one singular thing: MONEY. So when you don't engage with boosters, alumni, fans, and the media, and take the position that your job is to coach football games and is NOT to put people in the seats at home games, you are literally cutting off the program's lifeline. Far beyond the significance of having an actual home field advantage, if you haven't figured it out yet, every empty seat is lost revenue. Those giant tarps that Chip welcomed into the Rose Bowl during his tenure, those represented millions in lost revenue.
An empty stadium is a dead giveaway to networks that there isn't much fan interest in watching the games, so most of the games that are televised end up getting relegated to crappy time slots with crappy production crews, diminishing the brand even further.
And of course there is also the lack of recruiting that is fundamental to the job of running a football program, and also of actually fielding a winning football team. And you want to pretend there is no significance to racking up wins against crappy programs and FCS scrubs and losing to nearly every team with a winning record they faced in Chip's SIX YEARS of leading the program into the abyss. After thumping BigTen scrub UCLA, New Mexico's coach Jason Eck made a point of highlighting how not every win is as significant as others, that beating a crappy overmatched team is nothing to get excited about.
And as Boosters are given the cold shoulder, they respond by closing their checkbooks and giving the program the finger. Alumni and fans do the same by saying F'It to the smaller scale donations, Wooden Fund, and season tickets, I mean why go to game with a couple thousand of your closest friends in emptiest stadium in the country, that you are then forced to watch when if you were at home you could have turned it off at halftime knowing full well what the outcome was going to be.
And all of this creates a constantly increasing series of positive feedback loops that result in UCLA football having less and less support, fan interest, and wait for it, MONEY!
And though a wildly popular theory among the imbecilic jackasses over at Bruingold, the notion that the people behind Bruinreportonline were responsible for running off Chip due to animus resulting from his refusal to talk to them is truly mindboggling. I mean in today's atmosphere of the stupider the conspiracy theory the more likely it is to be believed by large a large brightly colored swath of Murica this shouldn't really come as a surprise. But still, wondering if at any point you even considered the alternative that BRO was against Chip not because he wouldn't humor them with his time, but because they are a recruiting and UCLA fan site and they knew better than anyone what a lazy, disinterested recruiter Chip was, that he was burning bridges to talent all over the country, and that the program under Chip was floundering, and the on-field product was an absolute joke. But yeah, you keep telling yourself that he was UCLA's Great White Hope and if not not for the ungrateful fans ( that should have been grateful for all 35 of the amazing wins he produced in ONLY six seasons), UCLA wouldn't be in the mess it is now.
So who exactly is it that was so easily manipulated?
And apologies for exceeding the 6 second soundbite requirement