WATCH: Chip Kelly talks LSU's difficult week, enjoyability of veteran roster

UCLA's coach traded a few jokes with local reporters and gave condolences to the Tigers amid Hurricane Ida

UCLA football Chip Kelly talks to the media about how much fun it is to coach a veteran team, what he expects to see from LSU amid such a hectic week and the success of the offensive line against Hawaii.

CHIP KELLY

Ethan Fernea injury? He ok?

Good. We’ll see what he can do today but he’s going to attempt to do something today, so.

Ankle? Lower leg?

We’ll see what he can do today.

Talk to Dorian about failed hurdle attempt? Avoid plays like that?

Yeah. We always talk to our guys about making proper decisions in that situation. He’s done that before because of his athleticism but that wasn’t the right maneuver at the right time, so we’ll cover that. There’s also some ball security issues when you do that and the ball’s getting away from the body, so we want to make sure that we secure the football. We did a good job, we didn’t lose any, but there were some times where the ball was exposed and we were fortunate that we didn’t get a turnover for it.

Best ability is availability?

Yeah, everybody says that. No one wants to put themselves in harm’s way, so we’ve got to protect ourselves and we’ve got to protect the football.

Anything to tell fans about coming to game Saturday?

Yeah, I think it’s a huge game. You get an opportunity to see a really, really good football team in LSU and obviously I think we’re off to a good start, so it should be a great game, I think it’s one of the featured games from a TV standpoint this week, but the best place to go watch football is at the Rose Bowl.

Been in a situation like LSU where they've had to move everything to Houston?

No, I haven’t, and we actually had the TV on in the locker room on the way out here. First off, our thoughts and prayers go out to the people of Louisiana and it’s a lot bigger than football, what they’re going through. They experienced Katrina 16 years ago and this storm is as big as Katrina, so I hope everybody’s safe down there and I feel for Coach O and [inaudible], but they had to leave their families back there, so it’s a difficult situation for anybody to be playing, so our thoughts and prayers are with everybody in Louisiana who’s dealing with the storm right no.

Graduate patch on uniforms?

We had talked about that in the league a couple of years ago, so it’s something we’re really proud of here. I think we have 18 graduates, 16 of them are in grad school, so it’s the reason you go to college. It’s about being a student-athlete and that’s not an oxymoron; we’re really proud of what our kids have done in the classroom and a bunch of them have earned degrees. We have a kid in Chase Griffin, who earned a degree in 2½ years, which is kind of unheard of, and he’s enrolled in grad school, so we’re just proud of those guys and it’s something that we want to make sure everybody understood that when you come here, it’s about graduating and those guys did it, so they’ve earned it. That’s not something you put on there because you just feel like it, it’s something that they earned and they were all proud to represent UCLA as a graduate in our first game.

Coaching mature team help with communication and understanding?

It’s fun, to be honest with you. I think we’ve got a great mix; I think the younger kids have done a really good job of intermingling with the older guys, but the older guys make it easy on them because they’re empathetic to where they started—they know what it’s like to be a freshman, but we’ve got some really good role models with the older players that we have here who can show kids how to do things the right way not only on the practice field but obviously from a graduate standpoint in the classroom too. We’ve got a lot of really good role models in our older kids and that makes our jobs as coaches 1,000% easier.

Running game looked great, offensive line dominating?

I thought our o-line did a really nice job. Some guys got more extensive playing time – Nio, I thought Nio, for getting his first real quality snaps—and Nio has played a lot for us, but obviously not in the role that he was in the other day and obviously I think Sean and Alec and Jon have gotten older, Paul’s gotten another year of experience, so we were just happy with kind of their production, but like anything, when you watch the film as a coach and as a player, there’s a million things that we can clean up and fix and obviously it’s going to take a step up this week in terms of our opponent—a Power Five opponent, so it’s going to step up a little bit, but for a start it was good. I mean, you really don’t know what you have; you have an idea, I think, in where you are, but you don’t know until you play someone and it was fortunate for us, we got to get a lot of guys in, so a lot of guys got actual game footage of game time and there’s a lot of really good film for us to teach off of, but we were pleased with how the o-line played on Saturday.

Difference between LSU's championship team and 2020 team?

Well, it's what happens in all of college football. It's a yearly deal, it doesn't – it's very tough to sustain and there was a bunch of guys, a bunch of draft picks: The No. 1 pick in the draft in Joe Burrow, Ja'Marr Chase didn't play and he got drafted really high this year, Justin Jefferson was probably the top receiver in the NFL last year as a rookie, so there was a lot of good players. I think the other thing that coach O dealt with is there was turnover on his staff, so there was new coordinators on each side of the ball, so they started off not probably the way they wanted to, but they actually finished strong. And going with the Ben Bolch factor, they won their last two games, so they're on a high note from a momentum standpoint headed into this season so we're really excited about the challenge, it's a really good football team that is gonna have talent every step of the way, whether it's their wideouts, running back, offensive line, their defensive guys can really run around, they have two, probably two of the best corners we'll see. The two of them combined will be the best group of corners that we play this season so we've got our hands full. So we're gonna have to have a really good week of preparation for these guys.

Preparing for new coordinators?

You look at LSU film to get an understanding of what the personnel is like so you can watch the (???). You don't want to watch the (???) cause they're really good, so but you kind of see where the coordinators came from, what schemes they were familiar with. It sounds like they're going back to (???) offensively when Joe Brady was there cause the coach they brought it went with Joe, was in the NFL with Joe. So you kind of have an idea but you have to make adjustments on the run. We had to make adjustments on the run in the Hawaii game, a lot of the things Hawaii did last year, they weren't doing this year, so you gotta be prepared. You kinda have an idea going into an opener like we did against Hawaii, you think they're gonna be like this. We weren't right on everything we were thinking, but we had to make some in-game adjustments, we probably saw more four-down defenses from Hawaii than they played the season before, that's just part of what happens. Usually, at the beginning of the year, once you get two or three games in, each team's identity kind of shows itself and you get an idea of what they're gonna do. So we gotta be agile, especially early in the game, and just is what we practiced against and what we thought we were gonna get what we got? And if it's not, then we gotta make adjustments on the run.

Is there a way to neutralize a DB like Derek Stingley?

Not that's legal. No, I mean, he's as good a corner as we'll face, obviously people at the next level talk about him, how good a corner he is, really patient, sharp, he's got great technique and he's got obviously a skillset that works perfect for that position. So as a coach at times, when you see someone that talented, you actually kind of admire it, say 'Wow that's a really good player.'

Zach Charbonnet's high school coach...

Charlie?

He said you recruited him much harder out of the portal vs. high school, is that because of how he played at Michigan?

No, I don't believe that's the case, you can ask Charlie, I mean we were there to go see him...

I did ask Charlie.

Ok well, we recruited him really hard coming out of high school, we wanted him, he was one of our top guys when he was coming out of high school and when he put his name back in the portal, we went after him again. So we swung and missed the first time and we hit the second time.

How does transfer portal process work with recruiting?

When the name goes in the portal, we do the same exact thing that we do with a high school kid. The first answer at UCLA is is he an admittable student here? It's not fair to the kid or to us to waste our time with why are we gonna recruit a kid that we're not gonna be able to get into school. So fortunately for us, Zach's an outstanding student, he was actually in the Ross School of Business at Michigan. Once we cleared that hurdle, we knew it'd be a situation where he could get into school. Then we gotta contact the player, contacted Charlie, got a great relationship with Charlie, talked to him to kinda get an idea of what he thought Zach's thought process in terms of where we are in the whole thing. And then recruit him like you normally recruit a kid based on what the NCAA rules are, how many contacts you can have, phone calls, all those other things. He couldn't take a visit because we were in that COVID protocol period, but I think he knew enough about the school. He's got some teammates here, played with Shea Pitts, knows Bo, there was a familiarity with him so we were just real happy that we got a chance to get him.

Swat that ball away from Quentin Lake on sideline? Having fun with veterans?

Any time you have an opportunity to practice ball security, you do it. So I was just making sure he held the ball well.

Rick Neuheisel took issue with seeing so many old man knees on sideline?

We modeled it after his golfing attire.

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