Here’s an LA Times lede, from March 7, 2024, the writer probably would like to rephrase:

“UCLA’s new football coach came at a steep discount.”

Well, to stretch a point, I suppose you could argue Deshaun Foster once was a bargain for UCLA. As the writer noted, Foster’s $3-million contract to coach the Bruins was about half the value of predecessor Chip Kelly’s deal.

Today, you’d have a hard time convincing any UCLA loyalist – never mind the relative market dynamics – that Foster is any kind of a steal. The Bruins have flopped miserably in their first two games against Utah and UNLV, which means the next two against New Mexico and Northwestern, which ought to be gimmes, probably will be a death knell for Foster’s 14-game tenure if they aren’t.

Foster might have come at a discount 18 months ago, but the more pertinent discussion about him today is how much it might take to buy him out. If the Bruins decided to cashier him after this season, they’d owe him in the neighborhood of $5 million.

Around UCLA’s campus, and among its scattered influential boosters around LA, people must be looking at the world of college athletics turned upside down and asking this question: “What the hell are we doing here?”

It’s not merely a Deshaun Foster question. There have to be some misgivings about the Bruins having fallen in with their crosstown rival, USC, in joining the Big Ten Conference.

So many questions: Was there strong institutional support for joining USC in its defection to the Big Ten three years ago? What would have happened if the Bruins had stood firm and said no? Would it have been viable for the Big Ten to welcome the Trojans in, solo?

And ultimately: Might UCLA, in the next wave of TV negotiations (and thus, realignment), do as one message-board poster implored with three words a few months ago?: “Baby come back.”

The growing concern over Foster and the question of UCLA’s conference future are two different matters. Yet there’s a connection as well. If UCLA can’t get this football thing right -- and it’s struggled mightily to do it in the 30 post-Terry Donahue years -- then its status as a rock-solid Big Ten entity is always going to be in doubt. It's hard to imagine a more searing indictment of UCLA football than Kelly's voluntary departure as a head coach two years ago to a coordinator position at Ohio State.

Historically, UCLA has dragged around at least two millstones. Its football team plays its home games at the Rose Bowl, 26 miles from the Westwood campus. And fan support is, even in the good times, thin and insouciant. (To put it another way, the Bruins don’t travel when they play in El Paso at the Sun Bowl.)

Athletically, the school is a paradox. It has won 124 national championships and features some of sport’s most famous figures – Jackie Robinson, Rafer Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (at UCLA, Lew Alcindor). There’s proof of sporting superiority. Yet there’s a sort of patrician vibe around campus about athletics, that it doesn’t matter so much.

You could argue that’s a good thing – except when you look at the balance sheet. The Bruins have been hemorrhaging money for years, and in May, Kathy Bawn, chair of the UCLA academic senate, penned a letter to the chancellor expressing “profound concern about significant ongoing transfer of funds from the campus budget to UCLA Athletics at a time when the academic mission confronts damaging austerity.”

The school recently ran a $219-million deficit over six years, and it transferred $30 million from the general fund to athletics in the fiscal year ending in 2024.

As we speak, that deficit isn’t being eased by UCLA’s $10-million annual payment to Cal over a three-year period, for absconding to the Big Ten and leaving a sister UC-system school in the lurch (the lurch being the ACC).

Annual payouts of $75 million, and rising, from the Big Ten, will salve some of that deficit, but it still seems an uneasy arrangement that doesn’t address a bigger problem.

So if you’re UCLA, you hire on the cheap (relatively speaking, of course). You hire former Bruin running back Deshaun Foster, who had a thin resume in about a decade as an assistant coach, and who punctuated his first appearance at Big Ten media days a year ago with a memorably halting introduction. He said, “I’m sure you don’t know much about UCLA – the football program. We’re in LA. Us, and um, USC. (Long pause). We um … (giggling softly, then another long pause). I’m just basically excited, that’s it.”

Last week came the arrest and suspension of backup quarterback Pierce Clarkson, in an unspecified felony allegation. Clarkson had come from Ole Miss, and before that, Louisville.

All of it seems so out of step for UCLA – this jarring new world of college athletics, the transfer portal, NIL – like a pair of shoes that doesn’t fit. Last winter among the nation’s basketball coaches, who was most outspoken about travel in the rejiggered conference map? That was the Bruins’ Mick Cronin, who noted that Big Ten teams come to LA once a season, while “we have to go back (east of the Mississippi) four times. We’ve seen the Statue of Liberty (landing on airplanes) twice in the last three weeks.”

In that vein, Cronin later pointed out that UCLA places a higher priority on academics than some of their adversaries, so increased travel for student-athletes is a greater challenge.

Students of UCLA athletics recognize this for what it is – a proud school trying to make its way in a confounding new landscape, and not managing it very well.