Firing a coach in-season isn’t ideal — for many reasons. It means your season has gone south and likely your recruiting class with it. How do you retain commits and continue to recruit with so much uncertainty?
Just look at Penn State.
The Nittany Lions still have no coach after firing James Franklin in mid-October. And so when the early signing period opened Wednesday, Dec. 3, Penn State added just two players — putting their class at 150th nationally per 247Sports rankings. Right next to South Dakota State and Princeton.
UCLA fired coach Deshaun Foster in September — just three games into the season — and went the rest of the regular season without a permanent coach. Despite uncertainty beyond 2025, the Bruins stayed afloat in recruiting. UCLA was able to keep players committed, and opened the early signing period with the No. 71-ranked class. Modest, but not bad for a team whose new coach will be coaching another team this weekend.
UCLA will hire James Madison coach Bob Chesney, with a deal expected after the Sun Belt championship game on Friday, Dec. 5. But Chesney hasn’t done any official work for the Bruins yet, so how did the Bruins keep recruiting momentum?
That’s where general manager Khary Darlington comes in. He and his staff and assistant coaches continued to hit the recruiting trails even though they didn’t know who the next coach would be — or if they’d be retained.
The motto with the support staff was ‘straighten your back and let’s get out there and do the job.’ Even through the doubt about UCLA’s future, Darlington said the staff fed off the momentum of each other and fully bought into the vision it was trying to create. It was the extra boost they needed to keep forging ahead.
‘Having the conversations after the coaching change, I don’t know if I can clearly articulate how difficult some of these conversations were,’ Darlington told reporters Dec. 3.
There were players that re-opened their recruitment following Foster’s departure, and Darlington said some players still committed wanted to see what their options were. He said rather than ‘trying to handcuff people and not acknowledging what their experience is,’ Darlington and his staff took the approach of honesty and giving recruits space to explore every scenario. Ultimately, he believes that paid off.
‘Rather than convincing people not to waiver, we encourage them and respected them. We encourage them to go through their process and told them that we will respect whatever that process was,’ he said. ‘I think that is what I guess you could say what our secret sauce was.’
As a result, UCLA ended the first day of the early signing period with 12 players signed, and a few more expected in the coming days.
Not having a coach did hurt the Bruins though. Two of their top recruits, four-stars Micah Smith (Illinois) and Carter Gooden (Tennessee), flipped. Still, 12 players isn’t too bad.
That doesn’t include four-star defensive lineman Anthony Jones from Irvine, California. Jones was one of the several players who de-committed after Foster was fired. He committed back to the Bruins in November and intends on signing his national letter of intent in February.
Darlington said ‘there was a lot of appreciation’ within the staff for pulling Wednesday off. It was an emotionally taxing adventure, but there’s belief UCLA is set up well for its next regime.
Not something every under-construction team can say.
‘Just the mere fact that we were able to land the amount of players that we have landed, have our staff be as motivated as they were throughout the entire process and finish strong the way that we did is encouraging,’ Darlington said.