Both UCLA and Virginia Tech made history on Sept. 14, 2025. Well, history as it pertains to the current college football coaching cycle.
The leaders at those respective schools decided they could tolerate no more from their top football leadership and moved quickly to dismiss DeShaun Foster from atop the Bruins, just 15 games into his tenure, and Brent Pry from Head Hokie 40 games into Pry's tenure in Blacksburg, Virginia.
The two schools are doing vastly different -- effective and ineffective -- jobs now of conveying their depth of commitment to their respective program's next head coach.
Tech Athletics Direcctor Whit Babcock already has lobbied, nay, pleaded, for significant more funding and financial commitment for Hokies athletics and football, specifically. News was shared Monday by several reporters in that area that Tech has a new plan to receive more than $200 million in additional athletics budget funding across the next four years.
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Maybe UCLA A.D. Martin Jarmond, now into his sixth year atop the Bruins athletics program, is finding similar ways to make relevant the Bruins.
But coaches ask questions. Coaches want to know about commitment. And coaches know that Virginia Tech is very publicly committing to enhancing the financial resources for all Hokies athletics and, again, especially football.
Let's also not forget that Foster was hired by Jarmond after Chip Kelly, who posted 25 wins during his final three seasons in Westwood, decided he would rather be offensive coordinator for his former mentee, Ryan Day, at Ohio State than to continue as head coach of the Bruins.
That's dysfunction.
But UCLA and Tech, presumably, both have a leg up on their inevitable competition for coaches in this just-starting-to-spin cycle. Eyeballs are glued to the situations at Arkansas, Florida, Oklahoma State and Wisconsin, among others.
Openings beget openings. It's the nature of the best.
All of this is discussed, along with thoughts on the ACC's new nine-game schedule, and we pay tribute to the late Shawn Clark, a coach, husband and father lost too soon at just age 50.
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