After years waiting to call plays, ‘Mr. UCLA’ Jerry Neuheisel got his chance. It was worth the wait

Most of college football was elsewhere.

And yet, as then-No. 7 Penn State began to fray beneath the Rose Bowl glow, televisions everywhere tuned in — to a winless UCLA team that hadn’t led for a single second suddenly roaring ahead, daring the football gods to believe the impossible might hold.

Against every reason it should have crumbled, an 0-4 team with no head coach and neither coordinator detonated a season’s worth of frustration in one afternoon. UCLA lit a fuse and never looked back during its 42-37 Saturday shocker under interim head coach Tim Skipper. But that shocker was engineered by Jerry Neuheisel, the quarterback-turned-assistant coach-turned “offensive play caller” who might just have blue and gold in his bloodstream.

Jeff Faris, the second-year head coach of FCS program Austin Peay, was knee-deep in engineering an upset of his own Saturday, toppling undefeated West Georgia long before word reached him about the Bruins’, and Neuheisel’s, sorcery.

Faris’ offensive coordinator, Quinn Billerman, sidled up to him with an ambiguous question that hung somewhere between disbelief and wonder.

“Man,” Billerman said, “did you see what happened with UCLA?”

“No, what?” Faris responded.

“I was shocked when he told me UCLA won,” Faris told The Athletic. “I said, ‘That is so awesome!’ And to score 42 against them (Penn State) … wow.”

Faris and Neuheisel — son of former UCLA player and head coach and broadcaster Rick Neuheisel — coached together as assistants during the Chip Kelly experiment in Westwood. That’s when Faris first caught on how “sharp” and “creative” Neuheisel was. When Faris took the Austin Peay post for the 2024 season, Neuheisel inherited his tight ends. The baton pass felt natural, the two having already forged an easy friendship that seems to come standard with working alongside Neuheisel in Westwood.

“He is like Mr. UCLA,” Faris said. “Everyone on that campus knows Jerry. He’s a very good recruiter and he’s got great personal skills, but it’s his passion for that university that shines through.”

Neuheisel joined the Bruins as a walk-on quarterback in 2013 and authored his first act of wizardry in the 2014 season — coming off the bench in Arlington, Texas, to rally UCLA past Texas, a comeback so electric his teammates carried him off the field.

A Bruins lifer through and through, Neuheisel never strayed far. After a season cutting his teeth as Texas A&M’s offense quality control coach, he was lured back home — first as a graduate assistant under Kelly, then climbing rung by rung from receivers coach to tight ends coach.

He had the opportunity to leave UCLA this offseason to become the OC at UConn for his old coach in Westwood, Jim Mora, program sources told The Athletic, but opted to remain at his alma mater.

And then, this week, after years of devotion to the Bruins, fate handed him the play sheet.

JERRY NEUHEISEL

HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF pic.twitter.com/vKi18i1XPa

— Liam Blutman (@Blutman27) October 4, 2025

Former Bruins wide receiver Theo Howard, once mentored by Neuheisel, posted during Saturday’s game that his old position coach had spent years lobbying for a shot to call plays at the Rose Bowl.

So when the headset was finally his — just four days before facing the country’s then-10th best defense, Neuheisel treated sleep like a luxury he couldn’t afford. He said he snoozed three hours in four days, lost in the hunt for a perfect script.

“He went straight to work. We used every single hour and second and minute you can possibly use all the way up to kickoff,” said Skipper. “I just love the work ethic and the patience he had. And the guys, man, they really respond to him. …You can see true love and belief.”

For a program that hadn’t held a lead all season and averaged 14.25 points a game, the transformation bordered on absurd. The same roster that plodded through four games played like it had been unshackled.

Together, Skipper and Neuheisel first sparked that belief Friday, inside a late-night offensive meeting at UCLA’s campus.

“Last night, I knew we had a chance,” Neuheisel said after the victory. “It was the most enthusiastic 0-4 team you’d ever seen in your life. Then, all of a sudden, you get this delusional optimism, like, ‘We might have a chance at this thing.’”

Before ever meeting Neuheisel, Faris was a 5-foot-11 defensive back at Duke, taking orders from the same defensive architect Neuheisel outdueled on Saturday: Jim Knowles, who is also the nation’s highest-paid defensive coordinator, cashing in $3.1 million annually.

“If you told any coach three days before the game that you’re gonna be the offensive coordinator,” Faris said, “it’s not like you can go to your whole repertoire of plays at other places because you’ve practiced a certain way the whole year, so to score that many points like that is mind-boggling.”

Jimmie Dougherty, a former UCLA passing game coordinator and wide receivers coach, could relate. Now Washington’s OC, he once shared the UCLA offices with Neuheisel, then a graduate assistant, both buried in Kelly’s playbook and chasing opportunity.

As his Huskies mounted a miracle 24-20 comeback at Maryland, Dougherty was clueless about the miracle brewing in Southern California. The news reached him on the team bus, Dougherty somewhere between astonished and proud.

“I’m sure he’s (Neuheisel’s) played it out in his mind many times as far as thinking, ‘If I ever got to call it, this is what it would look like,’” Dougherty said. “Still, pretty wild calling plays for your very first time against a defense like Penn State.”

Core memory unlocked 🥹

UCLA’s new OC Jerry Neuheisel celebrates with his wife 💙 pic.twitter.com/4Tmj4jdwd6

— Yahoo Sports (@YahooSports) October 4, 2025

In fact, every corner of Neuheisel’s past had reason to smile Saturday.

Kevin Sumlin, the former Texas A&M head coach who first hired Neuheisel, had his own game to watch with his son Jackson working on Maryland’s staff. But the Jumbotron stole his gaze every few minutes, flashing touchdown after touchdown as Sumlin watched his protege’s masterpiece unfold.

“His personality really helps. The players notice,” said Sumlin. “You could see it on his face when watching him on the sideline. He was having such a good time. He was exactly what they needed. He’s smiling, laughing, smacking guys on the back.”

That joy, Sumlin said, flipped something in the Bruins locker room. UCLA had trudged through the season as the nation’s 112th-worst offense. But under Neuheisel, the tension lifted. The pace quickened. The sideline loosened. The players came alive.

Sumlin saw it clearest in Nico Iamaleava, who ran for three touchdowns Saturday to become the Bruins’ first quarterback to achieve the feat since 1978. With Iamaleava buried beneath months of criticism and pressure, Sumlin said Neuheisel unearthed something looser, freer and unmistakably fun in the QB.

“Look at how (Iamaleava) played,” Sumlin said. “He was lights out, like a totally different guy. He was free for whatever reason. He looked like the quarterback that everybody thought he was back in high school.”

The Bruins’ forever-grinning Goldilocks breathed life back into the Rose Bowl, the kind it hadn’t felt in years. UCLA’s offense finally moved with rhythm. Joy was injected back into the playbook.

Neuheisel called the plays — the flawless plays — and simultaneously called back the fun, the faith and the feeling that UCLA could still be UCLA.

“Most coaches don’t lead campus tours. He leads them all,” Faris said. “Whenever former players come back, they always wanted to see Jerry. He’s an institution there. Couldn’t be happier for him.”

(Photo: Luke Hales / Getty Images)