In Reply to: Bruins score an early win in bid to select next football coach posted by mh on September 29, 2025 at 09:39:40
When you have an NFL HC opening, you have something that pretty much every assistant in the league wants. Thus, you can interview candidates multiple times, talk to people all around the league who know them, rank them, etc. There is no downside for a sitting assistant to be talked about as a candidate for your job; in fact, it makes them look good.
In college (and especially UCLA at the present moment), a lot of candidates have little or no real interest in your job, and you have to do a lot of your feeling out/recruiting in secret. Candidates aren't just going to line up for interviews at the Morgan Center like interns looking for their first big break. The top candidates, sitting FBS head coaches, will be wary of disrupting their current situation/recruiting, hurting their reputation, or being strung along as a Plan B candidate. Most will still be coaching their current teams when our courting of them is taking place. They're not going to put on their best suit and go golfing with Myers and Wasserman over Thanksgiving.
One example of this kind of old-fashioned, meet the parents-style of search was in 2002. The finalists, if I recall correctly, were Mike Riley (who was in the USFL) Karl Dorrell (a position assistant in the NFL), and Greg Robinson (a coordinator in the NFL). In other words, all guys who would take the job at the drop of a hat and thus were perfectly fine with being paraded around as candidates. But these are the kind of candidates you want to avoid.
Unless your plan A is to poach the best college coordinator you can get (Will Stein, Ben Arbuckle, etc., i.e., the next Kenny Dillingham) or brilliant NFL assistant (e.g., John Harbaugh in 2007), the approach outlined in the article may be hard to put into effect.
I think it is very likely that UCLA will start off by just going out for a guy they want, and I think that guy is pretty clearly going to be Jedd The Fisch. Fisch brings instant credibility, probably some staff, probably some transfers, and probably some high school recruits, as well as a clear message that UCLA FB is not dead (since they took Washington's coach). It's the shortest path to turning things around.
Of course, many here will say "no way will UCLA pay his buyout". Yeah, maybe, but how many of you said "No way will UCLA fire a head coach 3 games into a season" or "Deshaun Foster will get 4 years"?
Things are changing so fast, and the stakes are now becoming so existentially high, that you never really know what could happen.
I'm sure Myers and Peters are smart guys, but I hope they don't make the mistake of trying to bring NFL sensibilities and tactics to the college landscape.