i might be in the minority but i feel the this might be an indianapolis colts situation. as great as nico is, he sorta reminds me of DTR and anthony richardson. the ceiling is so high but also the floor can be so low too. the volatility just kills the team sometimes. when the colts finally decided to give daniel jones a shot instead of anthony richardson, their floor was so much higher than when richardson was the starter with a lower ceiling they can manage. it unlocked the receiving game and gave johnathan taylor more room to operate too. the turnovers went down and they were able to just have more stability in their offense with good decision making and non-demanding throws.

i'm exciting to see how this will play out and would not be surprised if we see a daniel jones resurgence type unlocking with ty.

DC Colin Hitschler worked for Wisconsin HC Luke Fickell:

For defensive coordinator Colin Hitschler, Saturday’s contest is more than another opportunity to extend UCLA’s undefeated start – it’s a reunion with the man who helped shape his coaching career.

Before arriving in Westwood, Hitschler spent six seasons working under Fickell at Cincinnati and Wisconsin as a senior defensive analyst and eventually co-defensive coordinator, leading a secondary that produced future NFL superstar defensive backs like Coby Bryant and Sauce Gardner during the Bearcats’ most dominant era in modern program history.

https://dailybruin.com/2026/10/16/bruins-to-battle-badgers-in-rose-bowl-return-as-ucla-football-eyes-cfp-bid

Chesney’s JMU team faced Wisconsin QB Colton Joseph a year ago:

Chesney’s staff has plenty of familiarity with Wisconsin quarterback Colton Joseph.

Last season, Joseph was the Sun Belt Conference’s Offensive Player of the Year while at Old Dominion. After throwing for three touchdowns in the first half against James Madison, he had the Monarchs in position for an upset before the Dukes pulled away.

“He kicked our butt last year in the first half – found a way to be explosive with the ball in his hands and obviously hit some deep balls and has done the same thing this year,” Hitschler said. “Not surprised at all to see his success with the program he’s at.”

https://nypost.com/2026/10/16/sports/ucla-football-5-keys-to-remain-undefeated-vs-wisconsin/

https://youtu.be/wJBmLAUMX18?is=NG11zNJekIDH1opb

This year we're going to be doing a lot of winning, so we'll have every chance to see more of these INSANELY high quality football videos!

I suggest like and subscribe to uclaathletics. The more view, share, and comment the more we boost our national profile+ AD revenue.

I just realized it's been posted before. still worth noting that we must like and subscribe to make the YouTube revenue for the department go up!

https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/50190410/sources-college-football-playoff-nearing-deal-24-team-format

He seemed to be a key DB for UCLA during this early part of the season.

Huge UCLA fan here who follows the media pretty closely, but I’m admittedly 100% out of the loop when it comes to Barstool content. Lately, I’ve seen Liam Blutman everywhere driving a ton of vocal UCLA content and stepping in as a superfan.

I don't remember hearing of him or seeing him anywhere around the program during the Jim Mora, Chip Kelly or DeShaun Foster days, so I’m curious…Was he already an established voice in the UCLA beat that I somehow totally missed, or is he just now bursting onto the scene as an influencer/personality?

No hate at all, his stuff is super pro UCLA, which is awesome to see on a national stage.

Less class than Clown College...and that's saying something.

For anyone who wants to hear Josh and Matt on the Bruin radio broadcasts, the archives are now available again on the UCLA Athletics site. The live game calls have been available all season. But, streaming replays of the game broadcasts have not.

Anyone who wants to hear what a real play-by-play of the UCLA-UO game sounds like, you can now listen away. Yes, Josh is a homer. But, I'll take someone homing for the Bruins any day over the biased and boring network broadcasters.

https://uclabruins.com/listen-live

Hey all,
Coming from out of state for this game (not an MSU fan). Wondering about when this game might start? Online still says TBD. Excited to visit the famous rose bowl!

It’s difficult to find a more impressive coaching performance in college football than what Bob Chesney has produced at UCLA this season.

After going 3-9 in 2025, the Bruins are 5-0 and ranked 12th nationally. They are also coming off their most impressive victory in years, having gone into Autzen Stadium to beat Oregon, which was a double-digit favorite entering the game.

Ever since Curt Cignetti penned the opening chapters of the greatest turnaround in college football history at Indiana in 2024, people have made it their mission to find the next program that could pull off a similar leap.

Naturally, UCLA has drawn many comparisons. First, Chesney replaced Cignetti at James Madison and came to his current job after a successful run with the Dukes, just like Cignetti did. They both took over lifeless football programs at basketball schools and immediately injected them with newfound life and energy. And they both worked the transfer portal magically in their first offseason at their respective schools.

The Bruins’ emergence raises all the sensible questions. How are they pulling this off? In what ways is it similar to — and different from — the Hoosiers’ breakthrough in 2024? And how will UCLA handle the devastating loss of starting quarterback Nico Iamaleava?

The Athletic spoke to figures in the industry who have seen UCLA up close this season to better understand those questions. They were granted anonymity in exchange for their candor.

“I actually think UCLA has better talent/traits across the board,” said an FBS general manager who saw the Bruins and the 2024 Indiana team in person. “Indiana was just a really good football team that was talented enough to make a run. UCLA was a really talented football team that finally has the coaching to rein it in and help them reach their full potential.”

Read for free: https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7688232/2026/10/14/ucla-football-turnaround-bob-chesney/?unlocked_article_code=1.IlE.5Dd_.Pzp7qNprLQBn&source=emp_shared_article&smid=re-share-ta

I’m pumped about this UCLA team. They are leaps and bounds beyond expectations and where they were as a program 10 months ago. This is uncontroversial and unquestionable.

But I’m going to make the case that this UCLA team is maybe overachieving relative to what’s actually happened on the field. I don’t seek to be a wet blanket, but instead, to share why my expectations about the rest of the season are tempered, and maybe to convince others to temper theirs as well. I think this UCLA team is comfortably a top-25 team, but I don’t think this UCLA team is top-12, or playoff level. I have to reiterate that debating how good UCLA is in this way is a strong signal of the massive jump in the status and quality of this program. But I’m going to engage in this debate anyway.

I’m going to make three arguments: 1) UCLA’s opponents are significantly worse than we might like to think; 2) UCLA’s very obvious offensive woes, particularly at QB, put a hard ceiling on UCLA’s season; and 3) UCLA’s turnover luck might be inflating our understanding of this defense’s performance.

1. UCLA’s Opponents

Frankly, I’m bearish on UCLA’s strength of opponents to this point, causing me to be timid to make big conclusions about how good this UCLA team is. To be clear, beating good opponents is good, and beating bad opponents by a lot is also good. UCLA has done both of those. But where some see, for instance, a national powerhouse in Oregon, I see a program in decline that is having a bottoming-out season, potentially on par with 2025 Penn State.

Per Simple Rating System (SRS; cfb reference’s metric for strength of record), UCLA’s opponents this year are 70th (Cal), 100th (SDSU), 37th (Purdue!), 73rd (Maryland), and 22nd (Oregon). UCLA’s postgame win expectancy (Bill Connelly’s metric for the likelihood a team would win if you replayed the game with similar stats) doesn’t raise any signals—the Bruins are 70%+ in each, meaning there were no games where UCLA analytically should’ve lost.

But the Bruins haven’t played any great teams. Cal is trash, San Diego State’s season is quickly becoming a disaster, Maryland is going to fire their head coach at any moment, and Purdue, while scrappy, is fine at best in a prove-it year for Barry Odom.

Oregon, while talented, has clearly collapsed. Their assistant hires were massive missteps, their quarterback play and depth is far worse than they expected (even when including Dante Moore), and their defense is nothing like what it was. Their SRS in week 5, with big time opponents still left on their schedule, is the worst it’s been since 2021, when Mario Cristobal’s Ducks got their ass kicked by Utah two times in three weeks. This team might not be ranked in the top 25 by seasons end, and we may be talking about Lanning being in the hot seat come 2027. UCLA’s win against the Ducks, while important, is nowhere near as important as it would’ve been in, say, 2014 or even 2022.

Of course, UCLA has no huge tests to pass this year, though they do have what should be difficult games. But UCLA’s analytic profile relative to its opponents doesn’t scream 6-1 the rest of the way.

2. UCLA’s Quarterback Play

I don’t think anyone on this sub would disagree that UCLA’s quarterback situation is uncertain, and many might agree that it’s approaching red alert. Nico Iamaleava is 128th in QBR, 132nd in Expected Points Added, and basically outside the top 100 in every advanced metric for quarterbacks.

Needless to say, that’s quite horrific! In a sport where QB has become the single most important position on the field, the quality of play UCLA is getting out of that position is not viable for a playoff berth. In 2025, the worst starting playoff QB in terms of QBR was Alonza Barnett at (ironically) Bob Chesney’s JMU, and it was quite obvious that JMU probably shouldn’t have been given that playoff spot.

(Edit: I wrote this before I heard about Nico’s season ending. Whoops! I think the point still stands, since relying on the third-string QB puts UCLA in the same position.)

It might as well be a law that you can’t win 10+ games without at least average quarterback play, and UCLA is getting among the worst QB play in the country. That UCLA is doing what it’s doing with the play it’s getting at QB is remarkable, almost miraculous. It speaks to Chesney’s quality as a coach, and it also doesn’t portend well for UCLA’s chances of making a playoff.

3. Turnover Luck

This is the one UCLA metric I don’t think people are talking about enough. UCLA has had a pretty decent to large turnover luck margin in every single game it’s played this year. Of course, only in the Oregon game would it have mattered—UCLA was +6.7 in TO luck, meaning their TO luck resulted in 6.7 additional points in a game where UCLA won by 2.

What is “turnover luck” and why doesn’t Chesney’s defense get credit for TO luck? In short, the analytics over long periods of time reveal that 50% of pass deflections are intercepted and 50% of fumbles are recovered. This makes sense: You can’t really control how the ball bounces on these plays, and recovering a high rate of them is thus not within team’s control. Of course, teams CAN force a lot of fumbles and CAN cause a lot of pass deflections. That’s the denominator and doesn’t factor into TO luck. It’s purely about recovery and outcomes.

UCLA has been quite lucky in recovering fumbles. UCLA has a 50% rate of picking off pass deflections (10/20), but a 100% rate of recovering fumbles (they’ve forced 7, and have recovered 9, including some of their own). I think UCLA’s defense is good (25th in SP+ as of this writing), but I think it’s far from elite and some of the TO luck might be inflating our ideas about them.

Conclusion

My conclusion is that UCLA is back, whatever that means. Bob Chesney has charted a clear path to viability for this program. UCLA is, unquestionably, taking a massive step forward as a program.

But UCLA might just be a top-25 team rather than a playoff one. The way this season has unfolded has made me both excited and wary of the CFB Playoff contention discussions. It’s pretty crazy how we’ve gone from being perpetually 3-9 to “actually maybe UCLA isn’t a top 12 team, just top 25” in a single season. It’s a major accomplishment and this team has finally given UCLA fans hope.

But I don’t think going, say, 4-3 over the next 7 weeks should shake anyone’s confidence in this regime, and I think people ought to recognize this is both a serious possibility, and one that is totally fine given the larger context of the program.

Like zones ~16 versus 21? Or go on the other side of the stadium? Or general admission?