With Bob Chesney, UCLA Isn’t Scared Of A 12- Or 24-Team College Football Playoff

LOS ANGELES — It sounded like coachspeak to me. “Doesn’t matter. Get better,” Bob Chesney said. Inside his office, overlooking a practice field bathed in 84-degree warmth on a Monday in November, the UCLA coach sat in patented black shorts and a black shirt with a Bruins-blue Air Jordan logo. He kept to the talking points he’s held not just this season but also for the previous 26 years of his coaching career. And he put on a damn good seminar. His energy, his positivity, provided enough wattage to jump start a program that hadn’t been ranked in the top 10 for five years. To me and my college sports colleague, Ben Portnoy, Crockett to my Tubbs, Chesney laid out how his team has put itself in prime position to lead UCLA to its first appearance in the College Football Playoff. “Every little thing — the way we’re putting the weights away — everything has to be defined,” Chesney told us. “When you start taking care of those little things in January, February, March, and building this foundation of extreme competitiveness, where everybody is just going at each other all the time, eventually, it’s just iron on iron all the way through.” Knowing that, hearing that, I asked him how he felt about the new 24-team tournament to crown a national champion given his unique climb to the top of the sport. Remember, Chesney has been head coach at Division III, Division II, FCS, Group of Six and now the Power Four level. And he led James Madison to the CFP last year in its current 12-team format. Chesney has won a conference championship everywhere he’s been as a head coach, including Division II, which has 32 teams in its playoff, at Assumption College, on the field named for former LSU and Notre Dame coach Brian Kelly. “The thing is, I don’t care what the number is,” Chesney said. “We made it at JMU. So we’re gonna figure out a way to get into the playoff, regardless of what number you put it at. A tournament just makes sense to me. And the more people you put in, who knows? This team loses their quarterback. This team gets in now. Now you gotta face adversity. Are you really the champ or not?” Goosebump, kinfolk. Nothing I love more than someone who believes it does not matter. Just put me in the fight. It’s not as if UCLA has lived a charmed existence on the way to 9-0 for the first time since 1998 and a top-5 ranking for the first time since 2001. Losing a quarterback? He could’ve been — probably was — speaking about his own team. You might remember the Bruins lost starting quarterback Nico Iamaleava to a season-ending injury in a Week 6 win at Oregon. Ty Dieffenbach has stepped in and helped them remain undefeated. But that fact, losing the starting quarterback, kept an undefeated Florida State out of the 2023 College Football Playoff. Chesney and his team, though, had accepted a nasty reality about a player they love and had been important to their success. And that’s OK. The injury rate in this sport is undefeated. No team escapes the season without injury. Chesney sees these challenges to his team, to himself, as day-to-day exercises in belief. The Bruins believe in being real with each other, open with each other, vulnerable with each other. Chesney told Ben and me that a tournament to crown a national champion with a field as large as 24 teams gives us all a chance to witness that process used to create greatness. “There’s a lot that you could learn from those tournaments,” he said, “as opposed to, here’s three games that are going to be played by these teams that are perceived to be the best. But I also get it; you don’t want to dilute it too much either. But the adversities that show up in there, I think, are all good lessons for a lot of people, and you really learn who people are as they have to fight through those.” During a 60-second walk from the football facilities at the J.D. Morgan Center, athletics director Tim Harris told Ben and me much the same thing. The news that the College Football Playoff will double the field in 2027 from 12 teams to 24 was met with positivity in Westwood. This year, there are still three regular-season games to play. The Bruins face USC in their traditional cross-town rivalry to end the season, and they could face defending-national champion Indiana in the Big Ten championship game. With a loss to either of those two teams, UCLA could fall out of favor with the CFP selection committee and put an end to what could be a dream season. The 24-team CFP is no longer a hypothetical idea but a signed and sealed contract deliverable in just over a year. In that format, UCLA could likely lose its last three games and still make the CFP as a nine-win team. It’s a champagne problem for a program like the Bruins’, who have a rich history in the sport but have not made the CFP since its inception in 2014. At his office, I asked Harris how he felt about knowing the 24-team CFP is how the sport will crown a national champion in the future. Harris — after 35 years with the Los Angeles Lakers in various capacities, including president of business operations — doesn’t see the problem with the 24-team CFP like some others do. “What is the argument that it hurts?” he said. “I guess if you were gonna make the counter-argument, you’d say dilution. I don’t think we’re there yet.” The CFP won’t stop at 24. That’s what so many have said and that has proven true through the first 12 years of its existence. It has grown three times since 2023 alone. Hasn’t that led to more opportunities to develop players? To find out what each man privileged enough to play this sport is capable of becoming? I see it as Chesney and his program do. At UCLA, they want the fight. They want the challenge. They want the opportunity to find out just who and what they are about. And that is worth the price of a 24-team playoff. Look who sounds like they’re taking coachspeak now? (Me.) It ain’t coachspeak if you believe it. And I do.