This piece is a sequel to “Dizon’s Disposition: UCLA football’s home is better suited to be SoFi Stadium, not Rose Bowl,” which was published Nov. 10.
There’s a question on everybody’s mind: Have the Bruins played their last home game at the Rose Bowl?
The one on mine: Would it be such a bad thing?
I was surprised by the outcry stemming from UCLA’s possible move to SoFi Stadium on Oct. 29, when the City of Pasadena and the Rose Bowl Operating Company filed a lawsuit alleging that UCLA was attempting to leave the iconic college football venue despite 18 seasons left on its contract in favor of its new NFL counterpart in Inglewood.
Frankly, I am still perplexed.
People aren’t going to Bruin games at the Rose Bowl. There seems to be little support for UCLA football outside of alumni and a few headache-inducing UCLA-specific social media accounts. And the Bruins were a college football afterthought long before their 0-4 start in 2025.
Yet, I’ve struggled to find many people even open to the idea of UCLA moving to Inglewood.
People don’t have to embrace the idea. They don’t have to agree with it. But I remain steadfast in thinking people shouldn’t write off the idea like it’s a direct attack on UCLA’s identity.
UCLA football doesn’t have an identity right now.
If you think the rest of the country outside Southern California thinks “UCLA” when they hear “Rose Bowl,” you’ve lost your mind.
At best, they hear “UCLA” and think of the photos of an empty Rose Bowl that circulate online every home game.
But chances are, they wouldn’t think of football at all.
Most people’s first criticism seems to be, “It’s not the venue, it’s the program.” But just how tied is UCLA’s attendance to its winning percentage since it moved to Pasadena ahead of the 1982 season?
If you plot every UCLA season since 1982 by winning percentage and average home attendance, the linear best-fit line has an R2 of just 0.042, where correlation is measured from 0 to 1.
That means just 4.2% of the variance in attendance is associated with the change in winning percentage.
Pearson correlation coefficient measures linear correlation by prescribing a score between -1 and 1, for perfect negative correlation and perfect positive correlation, respectively. Spearman correlation coefficient does the same, but for monotonic relationships, not linear ones.
Well, the Pearson correlation coefficient between UCLA attendance and win percentage is just 0.205, and the Spearman correlation coefficient is 0.179 – both of which suggest weak positive correlation.
Fixing UCLA’s attendance problem doesn’t seem like it’d be as easy as just winning more games.
Plus, UCLA isn’t just a head coach and an athletic director away from perennial 10-win seasons.
If it were that easy, everybody would do it.
The world doesn’t run on EA Sports College Football 26.
The Bruins have struggled with recruiting. But better recruiting isn’t merely a matter of “just trying harder” with a new head honcho and a couple extra thousand dollars.
A recruiting battle in Southern California means competing with USC, the SEC and every other notable program in the country. Playing at a two-thirds empty, century-old stadium just so they can “stay close to home” is not cutting it for many top recruits.
Sure, it’d probably help if UCLA were an elite program. But how do you recruit like an elite program before you’re an elite program?
People are going to point to coach Curt Cignetti’s rapid turnaround of Indiana after leaving James Madison and say it can happen at UCLA – people are already clamoring for the Bruins to snag current James Madison coach Bob Chesney.
But what Cignetti is doing is not easy and not common.
Hindsight is 20/20 – and it’s natural for opinions to change over time with new information – but people seem to have completely forgotten the initial excitement around UCLA’s hiring of Chip Kelly, the offensive college football pioneer, and DeShaun Foster, the lifelong Bruin and proven NFL talent.
Winning is part of building UCLA football’s culture. But so is growing its fan base. UCLA is trying to cater to alumni and donors. UCLA is trying to get current students involved.
And then there’s getting people who haven’t attended UCLA games to root for the blue and gold every Saturday. It’s a hallmark of every notable program in the country.
The Bruins aren’t ever going to fill a major stadium with solely students, alumni, faculty, staff and donors. So, how do you get the attention of new fans? You meet them where they already are.
Los Angeles went from 1995 to 2015 without NFL football. Now, UCLA again has to contend with two NFL franchises.
If Pasadena’s scenery and tailgating in the Rose Bowl’s surrounding parking lots, fields and golf courses created such an enticing gameday experience, people would come to UCLA football games.
They aren’t.
The Rams severed their LA roots 30 years ago. The Chargers spent 56 of their first 57 years in San Diego.
But the Rams returned to the City of Angels in 2016 and the Chargers in 2017 – both moving into SoFi Stadium in 2020. The Rams rank seventh in attendance in the NFL heading into week 12 this season with an average of 72,726 fans, and the Chargers are No. 10 with 71,230 fans per game despite the venue’s official NFL capacity of 70,240.
Am I expecting sellout crowds for UCLA football just because it moves to Inglewood?
No, but if 70,000-plus fans want to watch the Bruins, it would be possible. And if the Chargers can rebuild its fan base playing in SoFi Stadium after leaving its San Diego base in the dust, then it’s more than possible for the Bruins to build a following 10-plus miles closer to campus.
There’s concern that UCLA will be a third-class tenant in Inglewood – that it’d be way too much blue and yellow at a single stadium. After all, the Bruins left the LA Coliseum because the NFL’s Raiders moved in.
But people also say SoFi Stadium lacks college football history – and they’re dead right.
SoFi Stadium provides the blank canvas the Rose Bowl never truly was.
If you’re an ice cream truck and business isn’t great – sure, you’d want to get better flavors, better quality ice cream and better cones. But say you can’t make all of that happen yet.
Would you rather make your rounds near where all the big trucks make their money? Or almost 25 miles away, where you can tell the few customers you do have about how pretty the mountains are and how old your ice cream truck is?
Oh, and to that first option, what if I could guarantee you that the big trucks don’t work Saturdays – but you could?
I’m not going to act like traffic doesn’t exist and getting anywhere in LA is pleasurable. I hate it, too.
But if the Rams, the Chargers and the NBA’s LA Clippers can coordinate to largely avoid games on the same day, I believe adding UCLA every other Saturday can be done. And Rams and Chargers fans seem like they’re able to get to their seats.
Even the 5-12 Chargers averaged nearly 70,000 fans a game in 2023.
Everyone wants an on-campus stadium, but it is not feasible.
There is no space, and there is no parking. Even if there was, you wouldn’t be able to convince homeowners in Beverly Hills, Bel Air, Brentwood and Westwood to agree to at least six Saturdays of college football every year.
People compare UCLA leaving the Rose Bowl in favor of SoFi Stadium to Miami moving from the Orange Bowl to Hard Rock Stadium. But the Hurricanes gave up a venue that was a seven-mile drive from campus for a multisport venue that is a 24-mile drive away.
SoFi Stadium isn’t perfect for the Bruins – no venue would be.
If your attachment to the Rose Bowl is solely based on sentimentality, resistance to change, tailgates and a disdain for the city, then there’s nothing I can say to convince you on the new Inglewood stadium.
But the goal should be finding ways to attract new fans, recruit elite players and signal a new era and revival of UCLA football.
In those ways and many others, I think SoFi would be better.
If all goes well, the Bruins will someday get their roses in Pasadena on New Year’s Day – and maybe even sooner than you think.
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