UCLA Is Where It All Began for Jedd Fisch As a Head Coach

The UW leader spent the 2017 season with the Bruins, capped by a month as the interim boss.

Jedd Fisch serving as UCLA's interim coach in 2017 celebrates a 30-27 win over California with Bruins offensive lineman Zach Sweeney. / Kirby Lee-Imagn Images

Jedd Fisch has the University of Washington football coaching job that Jim Mora Jr., the one-time Husky linebacker, always wanted. Seven years ago in a twist of fate, Fisch found himself awkwardly taking on a UCLA job that no longer wanted Mora.

Further demonstrating college football's seven degrees of separation, those two West Coast programs meet on Friday night in Montlake, with Fisch in the middle of everything, and everyone caught up in a concentrated Big Ten rebuild and trying to become bowl eligible.

For two games in 2017, UCLA gave Fisch his introduction to head coaching, which while only temporary, moved him ever closer to a full-time role.

On a Sunday morning in Los Angeles, following a 28-23 loss to rival USC adn dropping the Bruins to 5-6, UCLA athletic director Dan Guerreo fired Mora, the coach for six years, unable to wait for the season to end -- and doing it on the coach's 56th birthday.

His next call was to Fisch, Mora's offensive coordinator for just that season. Guerrero asked if Fisch would lead the team while UCLA conducted a hurried coaching search. With mixed emotions, because Mora had hired him, he agreed to do this to give the players a less difficult transition. For him, it was a tricky situation yet a coaching beginning.

"I always wanted to be a head coach," Fisch said this week. "There was never a doubt while I was growing up in the profession that I wanted one day the opportunity to run a team. it certainly gave me some insight to what it was going to take to be a head coach. it certainly was a big jump from a coordinator."

Mora was jettisoned from UCLA after posting seasons of 9, 10, 10 and 8 victories, and then enduring a pair of losing seasons.

Yet abrupt firings were nothing new to him. He was let go after three seasons by the NFL's Atlanta Falcons, partially for joking in a Seattle radio interview how his alma mater would be his "dream coacihng job." He was let go as the head coach by the Seattle Seahawks following a lone 5-11 season after the franchise saw a chance to hire Pete Carroll.

Mora since has resurfaced at Connecticut, with another set of Huskies, and he's coached them to a 7-3 record in this his third season.

Fisch, then 40, took over for him in Westwood and guided the Bruins to a 30-27 victory over California to make them bowl eligible. Reporters asked him if he had any interest in accepting a permanent job and the coach responded why not?

However, the day following the win over Cal, UCLA hired Chip Kelly as its new leader. He asked Fisch to stay on with the team through the Cactus Bowl against Kansas State, which the Bruins would lose 35-17, while Kelly put together a coaching staff -- that wouldn't include Fisch.

Kelly would not prove to be a long-term solution for the Bruins. He coached them to a mediocre 35-34 record over six seasons before quitting last year under fired and willingly taking a demotion, emerging as Ohio State's offensive coordinator.

Kansas State coach Bill Snyder greets Jedd Fisch while he was the interim UCLA coach before the 2017 Cactus Bowl. / Casey Sapio-Imagn Images

Fisch returned to the NFL for three seasons before Arizona gave him his first full-time head-coaching job at the college level and the Huskies lured him away from Tucson in January when Kalen DeBoer left the UW for Alabama.

With his 5-5 team, he will go head to head with DeShaun Foster, a standout UCLA running back who spent 10 years with the Bruins coaching that position group -- and working alongside Fisch during that 2017 season.

It's more seven degrees of separation, more coaching overlap, more incredibility of how everybody is related to everybody.

For the Husky coach, a month at UCLA as the main guy helped prepare him for what he does now -- which on Friday night is to hopefully lead his new team to a win over his old one.

"It was nice to have an opportunity for those five weeks," Fisch said of his interim job. "To have a practice at it, I would say."

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