The Early Season Struggles Party

Four schools entered the year with at least some expectations. All of them have wholeheartedly underwhelmed so far.

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Los Angeles, California; Madison, Wisconsin; Blacksburg, Virginia; and Manhattan, Kansas might as well all be on different planets. LA is one of the most infamous cities in the world, known for the bright lights of Hollywood and stardom. Madison is the lowkey capital of Wisconsin, a state known for the Packers, cheese, and an accent that’s so fascinating. Blacksburg is located smack dab in the Appalachian Mountains, providing residents and visitors with views to die for. Manhattan, or the Little Apple, is in the middle of one of the most rural states in the union, and unlike its New York City counterpart, only has a population of just over 50,000 people. On paper, it feels like there shouldn’t be a whole lot in common between those four cities, but when you look at the college football programs that lie within those places—UCLA, Wisconsin, Virginia Tech, and Kansas State—it becomes clear that disappointment, and even some dysfunction, is what they share.

Over the past couple of months, expectations have been a frequent discussion in this college football space. In my opinion, it’s important to analyze what certain schools, athletic departments, and fanbases believe their respective teams can do during a certain season. It helps frame the sport. For some schools, going 6-6 and making a bowl is considered a success. For others, that’d be a fireable offense.

UCLA, Wisconsin, Virginia Tech, and Kansas State’s expectations weren’t the same heading into 2025, but they all shared similar mindsets in that the previous season’s performance was not good enough. So far, it appears that last year has parlayed itself into this season, and in some cases, things have gotten far worse than they already were.

We’re just three weeks into the season, but I believe it necessary to dive into these four schools and examine what’s happening, what’s going wrong, and if there’s anything that can be done to fix it. Spoiler alert: the answer is probably no on that last part.

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UCLA

As I was typing this, it was announced that UCLA has officially fired head coach DeShaun Foster. Obviously, I don’t ever root for anybody to lose their job, but this was the right decision by the university. There was just no way he could continue as the head man with how things were operating.

Foster’s lack of head coaching experience is the place to start. Before taking the UCLA job, he was a grad assistant with the Bruins from 2014–15, then the running backs coach at Texas Tech in 2016, and returned to UCLA in that same role from 2017–23. When Chip Kelly, the head coach before Foster, decided to leave for the offensive coordinator position at Ohio State, UCLA—already grappling with a massive athletic department budget deficit—went with a supposedly safe (and inexpensive) hire by promoting Foster from within. He had no head coaching experience, but he was a running back with the Bruins from 1998–2001 and had obviously been working with the football program for a long time. It should’ve been obvious that he was being set up to fail, though.

In Foster’s first season, UCLA was transitioning to the Big Ten, a conference filled with schools like Ohio State, Penn State, Michigan, and several other programs that have more resources to win consistently. With UCLA’s current situation financially, as well as just a general lack of fan support due to apathy that’s set in because of underwhelming results over the better part of two decades, it was clear that things could potentially go sideways pretty quickly. And that’s exactly what occurred.

The Bruins went 5-7 in Foster’s first season, which was honestly better than expected, at least in my opinion. UCLA’s schedule was absolutely brutal. After narrowly beating Hawaii in Honolulu, the Bruins lost five consecutive games, all against quality opponents. But after losing to Indiana, LSU, Oregon, Penn State, and Minnesota, Foster’s squad got up off the mat and won four of their last six games to salvage the season. It wasn’t the perfect first year in Westwood, but it was certainly alright.

Then there was the offseason. Never has there been an offseason as dramatic as this for UCLA. (That’s probably not true, but hyperbole is my specialty.) The Bruins essentially swapped quarterbacks with Tennessee. When Nico Iamaleava announced that he intended to depart Tennessee following some turbulent NIL negotiations, UCLA welcomed the SoCal kid with open arms. As a result, incoming transfer Joey Aguilar, who probably thought he had the UCLA starting quarterback job on lock prior to Nico’s arrival, departed the program and headed east to Knoxville.

Iamaleava’s ceiling made his arrival an immediate boost to what UCLA believed it might be able to accomplish in 2025. The former five-star recruit was the number two quarterback in the 2023 recruiting class (only behind Arch Manning) and showed flashes of that talent at Tennessee last season. It didn’t always click—he had an issue of overthrowing receivers, particularly on deep balls—but it wasn’t anything that was deemed unfixable. With Iamaleava, drama aside of course, it appeared that maybe UCLA might be able to do something in year two in the Big Ten.

Wrong.

The Bruins opened the year with a soul-crushing, 43-10 defeat at the hands of former Pac-12 foe Utah. That was then followed up by an even more embarrassing loss to a UNLV team that gave up 31 points to Idaho State the week prior. And if it couldn’t get any worse, UCLA then went on to get its butt kicked by New Mexico this past Friday. Let me remind you all that New Mexico is on its third head coach in three years and had 75 new players—48 of which were transfers—enter the fold this past offseason, and it still made UCLA look like a bottom dweller. Yikes, yikes, and yikes again.

Once that transpired, it was obvious that UCLA couldn’t continue with Foster as the head coach. He will always be a legend there—UCLA athletic director Martin Jarmond made that clear in his statement following the dismissal—but starting year two of your tenure 0-3 was just unacceptable.

Where do the Bruins go from here? The job isn’t all that attractive because of a couple of factors. For one, the athletic department’s financial struggles would turn off any candidate with a pulse. Secondly, the fact that UCLA resides in the Big Ten, a conference where most of the members are east of the Mississippi River, makes travel a nightmare. While it is possible to build a successful program within those parameters—just look at Oregon—it is way more difficult without the necessary financial buy-in, which Oregon definitely has.

At the end of the day, UCLA’s days of shining underneath the Southern California sky are probably over. Well, at least for now. Maybe some hero will come take that job and revive the program. I deem that unlikely in the short term.

Hey, at least they still get to play in the Rose Bowl. It’s just a shame that they can’t get more than 250 people to show up for their games.

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Wisconsin

Luke Fickell made the College Football Playoff as the head coach at Cincinnati in 2021. His teams there were G5 juggernauts. Nobody could stop them. It was an absolute joy to watch.

Following the 2022 campaign, Fickell left Cincinnati for Wisconsin, a once-powerful program in the Big Ten that had fizzled out in the latter years of Paul Chryst’s tenure. Wisconsin had always benefitted from playing in the Big Ten West, the one division in college football that still valued gritty, hard-nosed, old-school Midwest football above all else. Sure, Wisconsin couldn’t compete athletically with the other big boys in the Big Ten like Ohio State and Penn State, but they could for sure compete with the likes of Iowa, Minnesota, and Illinois.