UCLA Football: Chip Kelly’s days with Bruins seem to be numbered

After UCLA football players showed their distrust of Chip Kelly with a potential return to campus, it seems as if the head coach’s days are numbered.

Trust is a huge thing in relationships. Whether that’s friendships, marriages or coach-player relationships, it means almost everything. When that trust is lost, everything falls apart.

Unfortunately for Chip Kelly, he seems to have lost the trust of his players in Westwood and that’s bad news for his immediate coaching future with the Bruins.

Kelly was expected to be the coach who turned things around at UCLA after a stint in the NFL but he hasn’t exactly shown progress through his first two seasons. The Bruins went 7-17 in two seasons with UCLA, failing to reach a bowl game each year.

Not only does he seem to be falling short on the field, his players don’t have the trust in him that a head coach demands.

According to a report from the LA Times, UCLA had a team meeting regarding the return to campus amid the COVID-19 pandemic and about 30 players came together to draft a document demanding that the school provide a third-party medical professional to oversee the testing and make sure things are done the right way.

Why is this needed? The players apparently feel as if Kelly won’t put the players’ health above everything else and they don’t trust him to move forward by the book.

This is a major problem for both the players and Kelly.

The future of UCLA football is cloudy

Everything seemed to be looking up when UCLA hired Kelly after letting go of Jim Mora Jr. I mean, the guy went 46-7 as head coach of Oregon from 2009-12 and has shown he can win in the Pac-12 and at a national level, but a 7-17 two-year record has changed the expectations.

Kelly was already on the hot seat heading into the 2020 season and it seemed as if he needed a bowl berth to retain his job or at least get another shot in 2021.

That hot seat got even warmer on Friday afternoon with this report surfacing and the athletic department has to look at the quote “UCLA has “perpetually failed us,” citing “neglected and mismanaged injury cases” and realize there are some major issues. Maybe Kelly has some skeletons in his closet.

Moving forward, his job will be under a microscope and he’ll no doubt be fielding questions about these statements all offseason.

When you lose your team’s trust, there’s really no going back.

Kelly’s time in Westwood may be coming to a close sooner rather than later.