Bob Chesney has UCLA 4-0 to start the season. Darren Yamashita-Imagn ImagesPaolo UggettiOct 9, 2026, 06:20 AM ETMultiple AuthorsOpen Extended ReactionsLOS ANGELES — Just after 6 a.m. before the sun is nothing but a slight orange glow breaking through the moonlit Westwood sky, Bob Chesney is already on, roaring to go.He emerges from the elevator at UCLA’s football facility wide-eyed, his voice already at decibels most people would reserve for daylight hours and heads to the campus tennis stadium nearby. On Tuesday mornings, he reserves a sliver of time to run up and down the steep steps. Everything else, Chesney says, is football.By 7 a.m., Chesney is back inside. He has traded his running shoes for flip-flops.
His hair is carefully coiffed, and as he stands behind a table inside the auditorium where the entire team meets at 7:15 a.m., he bobs his head to the rhythm of 50 Cent’s “Many Men (Wish Death)” as if he were a DJ spinning his best mix.On this particular Tuesday morning, the room is vibrating. Thirteen months after starting last season 0-3 and firing DeShaun Foster as head coach, UCLA is 4-0 and ranked No. 21 in the nation under Chesney. The program is nearly unrecognizable from its previous iteration, flying high while the man standing at the front of the room appears to possess the energy required to levitate.”The second half of this season starts right now, eight [weeks] are done,” Chesney says, his voice growing louder. “There’s eight more coming up here.
Just like you committed on Day 1 of camp, this is about a recommitment today.”The meeting is a tone-setter for the day, the week, the next opponent, which, in this case, is Oregon — the toughest team UCLA has faced to date. The meeting is also where Chesney’s coaching style comes into view, a style that has produced a 136-52 overall record and eight conference titles across five programs.In this room, everything feels as if it’s being run at twice the speed, as if the hurry-up offense the Bruins might utilize on the field has relocated indoors. Players sit with notebooks scribbling while Chesney flips through slides on a screen containing both broad mantras and hyper-specific game-plan tasks. He calls out a position group and on cue, each respective coach begins his spiel — often expletive-laden — that is part information, part motivation for what that group needs to do in the upcoming game.
On a few occasions, Chesney interjects to hammer the point home.”You will do what you have to do to win the game. That’s done. That’s not a debate. That’s a f—ing fact,” he says.
“I’m worried about how can you mentally take yourself to a different standard, hold yourself to that standard and never f—ing waver from it. That’s the question. How do I make that unbreakable? How do I bury my f—ing fracture point?”Once the morning meeting concludes, players break off into position groups.
Chesney hangs back with the special teams group where his longtime coach-in-crime Drew Canan, UCLA’s assistant coach who oversees special teams and tight ends, rattles off assignments for players and reviews game planning with the same relentless cadence. The two have been working together since he joined Chesney’s 2014 staff at Assumption University in Massachusetts.”I don’t think there’s a better person who can change a culture as he does,” Canan said.Canan recalls one Saturday practice during spring camp when the energy and effort from start to finish was impressive. Equally notable was the way players were not just in sync with Chesney’s vision, but enjoying being part of it.”It brought me back to the early days at Holy Cross, it brought me back to last year at James Madison,” Canan said. “It was the seventh or eighth practice we had [at UCLA] and I remember walking off the field and saying, ‘He did it again.
We’ve got it.'”TEN MINUTES AFTER the team has split into position meetings Tuesday morning, the mood inside the running backs room is one of quiet confidence.”Don’t be surprised if we have success,” running backs coach A.J. Steward tells the group. “They don’t play as hard and as physical as we do.”This room in particular is as emblematic as any of the kind of recipe Chesney and his staff have concocted that is working. Steward is one of the few holdovers from the previous staff and now, under his purview, there’s a former JMU running back (Wayne Knight), a former Iowa State back (Dylan Lee) and two returning UCLA running backs (Anthony Woods and Jaivian Thomas).
Together, this collection makes up the top rushing attack in the country in yards per carry (6.95) while Knight leads them all with 445 yards and nine touchdowns.About 10 months ago, after Chesney had taken the job and hired his staff, UCLA held a unique recruiting visit day. Every player who arrived in Westwood that day was coming from JMU, including Knight. After checking off their top priority of securing Nico Iamaleava’s commitment, Chesney, alongside new general Darrick Yray, shifted to the next important task: convince a group of JMU players who spent one season with Chesney that UCLA should be the next stop in their college careers.There was one issue. It was one of the handful of days in Los Angeles on which rain was in the forecast.”These guys had been hearing all about how great L.A. was and the weather and they get this?” Yray said with a laugh.
The former Florida State GM with West Coast ties had already bought into Chesney’s vision when he turned down a multiyear contract to stay in Tallahassee.”I’d always kind of told myself if the right opportunity ever showed up to get back on the West Coast, I’m going to come running,” Yray said. “The first time I got on the phone with Chesney, you start to hear him speak and it was like, ‘This dude is real.’ And you dive in and start understanding what was going to happen here. And I was like, ‘Oh, this thing has a chance to go.'”That Chesney & Co. have been able to generate as much excitement about the program and success early is inextricable from the fact that they were able to mobilize the foundation they had at James Madison westward. All told, 28 staff members and 11 players from JMU followed Chesney.”That’s a lot of people that are speaking the same language from day one.
It allows you to catapult your success a lot quicker in theory,” said Matt Transue, the program’s chief of staff by way of JMU. “It has definitely helped, especially early on when we were resetting the culture here. Now everybody’s bought in.”Signs of the Dukes’ influence and Chesney’s ethos from his first coaching job are everywhere. The practice structure is essentially the same one he has used at previous stops, including JMU.
Walk through the weight room and you’ll see a commemorative JMU weight plate hanging in one of the strength staff’s offices. The PowerPoint slide of “core principles” that Chesney used at Assumption, Holy Cross and JMU is the same one he used during his first team meetings in January at UCLA.”I think the awe factor for all of us that came from James Madison was, ‘How has this place not won at a high level?'” Transue said. “The first day we got here, we were like, ‘Holy cow, this is unbelievable.’ I think that appreciation too is a lot of our coaches are from lower levels. They follow Chesney from Division III all the way through.
So this is a big-time opportunity and they’ve already won with far less than what they have here now.”Still, Chesney contends they are building something new with familiar pieces rather than trying to recreate what they had. It has been his approach at every stop. But this time, he is attempting to build the same foundation on a bedrock of better resources, yes, but also higher pressure.”I remember when they eventually were like, ‘Hey, we want you to be the head coach.’ I’m like, ‘Damn, you’re handing me that much?” Chesney said of the program’s budget to go along with his five-year, $33.75 million contract. “I better get this s— right.'”Despite the bigger stak
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